Trainers, the ability to join Raids directly from your Friends List has officially launched, as announced by Niantic on the official Pokémon GO website! You can now join your Friends Raid, but you are not able to invite more people to that Raid.
To join a Raid from your Friends List:
- In Map View, navigate to your Trainer Profile.
- Tap the Friends tab at the top of the screen to open your Friend List.
- Friends that are currently waiting to join a Raid will appear in your Friend List with the Raid Boss below their Trainer Name. You can also sort your Friend List by which Friends are currently waiting to join a Raid.
- Note that you can only join Raids for Friends who have opted in to sharing their Raid activity.
- Tap on your Friend to view the Raid information, including the number of Trainers waiting to join the Raid and the time left before the Raid begins.
- Tap BATTLE to join the Raid. Note that the button will change color to reflect the type of Raid Pass that would be required to join, Green for an in-person Raid and pink for a Remote Raid.
Here’s how to know who is Raiding and which Raid you can join:
There is one curious thing about this screenshot, which is featured on the official Pokémon GO blog post. It looks like the screenshot uses the older lighting on the Pokemon and the old (better) character models. Did Niantic plan this months (years) ahead? Is the old Avatar system still alive somewhere? Or was this just an accident by the design team?
We will probably never know.
Note that once you join a Raid Battle from your Friends List, you will not be able to invite additional Trainers from your Friends List to that specific Raid Battle lobby. Certain types of Raids that are not able to be joined via Remote Raids, such as Shadow Raids and Elite Raids, cannot be joined from Friends List.
History of Raiding form your Friends List
This feature has been making the rounds unofficially for weeks now, with the initial version debuting just ahead of the Wild Area event in November. The initial version of this feature was available as a limited time test, running from November 21 through November 24, 2024.
Despite the amazing reception of that update, Raiding from Friend List had to be rolled back at the time, mostly due to a pretty bad issue with disappearing Raid Passes. In certain scenarios, the game would crash while joining a Remote Raid (or at any point during the Raid), and it would consume your Raid Pass, with no option to rejoin or capture the Raid Boss.
This was obviously a pretty bad user experience, and by what we can tell, it looks like it was caused by the “invite friends of a friend” part of the original version of this feature. If you remember, the original implementation allowed you to do two things:
- Join a Friend’s Raid from the Friends List
- Invite additional Friend’s to the Raid (which the original lobby creator may not know)
By what we can tell, the game was unable to reliably determine who invited who to a Remote Raid, which created a problem where the game couldn’t restore your Remote Raid Pass in case of crashes.
After this version was rolled back, a new version was rolled out on December 3, 2024, with an important update to cascading invites. This new version, which has now officially launched, works the same as a regular Remote Raid invite now and you cannot invite further Trainers:
