Trainers, hold on to your seats! It seems data miners caught wind of a possible new feature targeting the good old Pokémon GO PokéStop. Our usual data mining disclaimers apply – this is not endorsed by Niantic, nor confirmed to actually go to production – so take this with a grain of salt.
Recently today, PokéMiners shared this infographic on reddit, with icons pulled directly from the game’s visual assets bundles:
As of the time of writing this article, there are no mentions of this feature in the recent Pokémon GO APK (0.205.0), which leads us to believe that the feature – if its real and not an elaborate prank by Niantic – is being tested in a different build of the app.
We’re actually quite confident that we’ve seen this version mentioned in the 0.205.0 APK, or at the very least in the visual assets. Check out the “Internal icon” graphic below:
Our thoughts on the leaked tutorial
The new tutorial shows a PokéStop growing in size through three update levels, starting from Level 1 through Level 3. Judging by the “Page 1” illustration, one would assume that higher level PokéStops will yield more items per spin.
It’s not clear if the power ups will be temporary or not, but if it is the case, we would expect that each Trainer can apply one power up per PokéStop, relatively similar to Frackers in Ingress.
The “Page 4” illustration shows an visual effect around the PokéStop, probably fairly similar to an applied Lure Module.