Edit: This is actually an easter egg. Full story here.

A bug has been encountered in the lately introduced Buddy System that allows anyone to power up your Pokemon one more time than it’s actual maximum level.

The bug in short:

On the buddy stats page (accessible via clicking on his progress bar), there is a bug that does not refresh the data after powering up. That leads to the bug where you can power-up your pokémon one time higher than the app usually allows you.

Note: Abusing it would go directly against Niantic’s ToS.

This was first discovered by a Redditor /u/Wolfsblvt where he explains the whole story of how he encountered the bug this way:

He wasted his 0.8 km on his current Exeggutor buddy and switched to Hypno, which was close to max. He opened his stats page through the buddy window (clicking on him, then on the progress bar). This was its current state:

Then he powered him up, saw the CP switching back, and powered him up the next time. It then looked like this:

Then he got close to THE max level, looking at the total +CP there. Max CP should be 1919. He’s at Level 30:

And here’s the final result after clicking the power up button again: 1778 + 156 = 1934

Only to check that there is a server-side limit of trainerlevel + 2.0 , he clicked the button again, and got an error, like expected. (“Fehler” = “Error” in german)

Under the error banner, there was the same starting CP of 1778 like before.

Then he left the window and opened it again, his Hypno was 0.5 level beyond max level:

So that means, the app limits at trainerlevel + 1.5 while the API does at trainerlevel + 2.0 and the refreshing bug of the buddy stats page can lead to doing one power-up too much.

What are your thoughts on this new bug? Let us know in the comments below.

The original story on Reddit.