Niantic, the studio behind Pokemon Go, has been doing a wonderful job so far in keeping the game’s popularity after all those years. True to these words, the developers managed to overcome one of the biggest challenges the augmented reality game had to face in the past months – The COVID-19 pandemic which prevented players from leaving home in several countries. The game managed to keep its popularity while the publisher is constantly pushing new events to keep players engaged. Now, however, the studio made an announcement that will surely affect several players in the next few months.
Starting August, the developer won’t support 32-bit smartphones and tablets anymore. Niantic made a brief statement revealing that “In an incoming update to Pokemon GO at the beginning of August 2020, we will end support for 32-bit Android devices.” The studio further said, “By removing support for 32-bit Android devices, we will be able to streamline our development process and focus resources on supporting newer operating systems and technologies.”
The list of deprecated devices include popular phones from the past
The blog post listed a few select smartphones that will be affected by the update. Among them, we have the Samsung Galaxy S4, S5, Galaxy Note 3, Sony Xperia Z2 and Z3, OnePlus One, first-gen Moto G, and several other smartphones released before 2015. However, the list may include several other smartphones that came after 2015. The problem is, many manufacturers are shipping a 32-bit version of Android despite the 64-bit chipset. That may sound odd, but that’s exactly the case of the Motorola Moto G4 Plus, for example. It has a 64-bit chipset but runs on 32-bit Android.
You can check if you have a 64-bit smartphone by downloading an app like Device Info HW or CPU-Z and verifying that the CPU architecture is aarch64/arm64.
Some users on Reddit are building a list of devices that will lose compatibility in August. It already has 60 smartphones and that should grow in the coming days as more users are investigating their smartphones. We wonder how this decision will hurt the game’s userbase.
