Trainers, a new Pokemon GO update is rolling out in Google Play store, and it’s already available on APK Mirror. The update version number is 0.117.2, and it lands roughly two weeks after 0.115.2 / 0.115.3 updates were released.
The GO Hub team took an in-depth look at the new update to see what’s changed and, hopefully, if we finally got some hints of Generation IV and / or upcoming Community Days.
Big changes in 0.117.2
Age gates
Age gates have been a part of Pokemon GO for a while now, limiting underage players from accessing various features of the game – most notably, trading. The feature has been expanded in 0.117, introducing a list of minimum ages per country and a default minimum age (currently set to 13).
Additionally, we’re seeing traces of parent verification requirement for logging in, but nothing concrete to share now.
Big overhaul of badge loading
If you weren’t aware, when you open your Trainer screen, your badges, their localized names and sprites are loaded separately than the rest of the screen. As a result, there were often little bugs here and there that were causing confusion on the badge screen.
In 0.117.2 we’re seeing a thorough rewrite of the badge assets loading subsystem, with caching support for textual and visual assets required to render the badges screen.
Long live the BadgeAssetManager!
New flags for additional Raid XP
.ACTIVITY_RAID_LEVEL_1_ADDITIONAL_XP .ACTIVITY_RAID_LEVEL_2_ADDITIONAL_XP .ACTIVITY_RAID_LEVEL_3_ADDITIONAL_XP .ACTIVITY_RAID_LEVEL_4_ADDITIONAL_XP .ACTIVITY_RAID_LEVEL_5_ADDITIONAL_XP
Raids were already rewarding different amounts of XP depending on their Level. In 0.117.2, we’re seeing that five new “activity flags” were added to the infamous .HoloActivityType enumeration. We’re guessing that these do not hint to any major game altering changes, but rather enable better journal display and in-game XP gain tracking.
Acknowledging bans and app startup changes
You could be seeing a change in the time required for the app to load, as three new actions are happening during the app’s boot phase:
- .LOGIN_VERSION_CHECK
- .LOGIN_GET_PLAYER
- .LOGIN_AUTHENTICATION
These actions seem to be cached and super fast, resulting in an overall improvement to app startup time.
In addition to these changes, we’ve observed a new ban related code change that requires / allows players to “Acknowledge Punishment”. Details about this change are not yet fully known.
.get_PLAYER_DAY .ACKNOWLEDGE_PUNISHMENT .FORT_SEARCH .FORT_DETAILS
Friends list optimizations
Scattered throughout the APK, we’re seeing changes to the way Friends list works. It seems that the game is now fetching only the updated parts of the friends list, rather than the entire list part, which should result in better scrolling.
New trading warning for favorite Pokemon
- trade_pokemon_needs_unfavorite
- You must remove this Pokémon from your favorites before trading.
Smaller changes
- The update fixes the camera panning glitch on android
- More Upsight logging changes, ability to switch logging on and off (probably connected to underage players)
- Quest global settings modified to unknown effect
- Lucky backgrounds should be completely fixed now, especially during sorting
- Minor bug fixes and package updates
Parting words
No Gen IV, no significant asset changes. Bug fixes left and right, but this seems like yet another maintenance update before we start to get the big Gen IV leaks. Update as you wish, but this is not the game changer you were looking for.