Hey travelers,

Honestly, the Silph Road team is flat out running on fumes this week after we’ve been working pretty insane hours making sure the Silph League and your Traveler Cards are world-class, …but it’s not every day an APK comes along and duty calls!

Without further ado, here’s what the team has discovered in our review of the latest APK!

Niantic (who’s site is oddly broken at the moment) shared the following about v0.89.1:

Resolved a bug that caused the Pokémon collection screen to scroll to the top after evolving, transferring, or renaming a Pokémon.

Added the ability to sort the Pokédex by region.

Improved incubator sorting order when selecting an incubator.

Improved the way Pokémon scale throughout the app.

Various bug fixes and performance updates.

…and they weren’t kidding! This update is a bug fix and QoL goldmine.

1. Fixed the Darn Scroll BugTM !

A slew of bug fixes have gone out and are shown in the APK changes, travelers. But perhaps chief among these is a fix for the majorly irritating month-old bug where you would be returned to the top of your Pokemon after certain actions. Scroll position is now more proactively tracked and the bug is gone!

And just in time for the Community Day bonuses many travelers have been storing evolve fodder for!

2. Pokemon Size Scaling Overhaul

Niantic were serious when they said they rolled out changes to scaling. There are a slew of changes related to how large Pokemon appear in different scenarios (encounters, battle, info screen, dodge animations, etc).

You should notice the difference!

3. Incubator List Overhaul

Incubators are now grouped by type and … the infinite incubator now appears before paid incubators!

This is great quality of life update for our egg-hatching travelers who’ve accidentally used a non-infinite incubator on a 2km egg because of a mis-click. Those days are now behind us!

4. Pokedex Listings Broken Out By Generation

As the Pokedex list has gotten ever longer over subsequent updates, we’ve finally got an improved solution to navigating the ‘dex: generation tabs!

Hey – these look an awful lot like the generation tabs on TSR’s Global Pokedex… Just kidding. 😉

Might this accommodation bode well for impending new species soon?

5. AR+ Fixes and Tweaks

A chunk of new tweaks were made to the AR+ functionality – but nothing groundbreaking. These appear to be primarily bug fixes and optimizations.

6. Map Tweaks

It appears there are new renderers for roads, water, buildings and parks – among other map tile tweaks. Nothing too remarkable, but keep an eye out!

7. Side-Swiping Sensitivity Fixes

Swiping between screens has had issues on many devices, often causing you to move too far into your eggs/battle parties. It appears this has been much improved as well!

8. New Loading Screen!

It’s 2018 and now we can officially kiss the Christmas loading screen goodbye. Here’s the full-resolution image, travelers: https://i.imgur.com/gwSWCby.png

Note a few new species in the background! This bodes well. 🙂

9. Shiny Icons in the Pokemon List Page

Now it’s even harder to accidentally transfer your shiny Pokemon, travelers. The shiny icon (stars) appear in the listing page above any shiny Pokemon you’ve caught – calling extra attention to them!

We’re glad to see this, particularly since many shiny species are particularly subtle from the listing page without the special sparkles that flare up in the individual Pokemon info page.

10. Pokeball Selection History

Your last selected Pokeball is now remembered from encounter to encounter, travelers. Not sure yet if this is an intentional update or a glitch – but it’ll be here for at least this update, so be aware!

11. Performance Upgrades

We see a few new things regarding keeping track of multiple requests (possibly with potions and their animations) and other small tweaks. See if you can feel a performance upgrade!

And that’s it!

This update is a quality-of-life goldmine. We’re so relieved to see the scroll bug resolved ahead of this Saturday’s Community Day bonuses! We’re also pleased to see Niantic incorporate the incubator re-ordering (and even grouping) which so many have requested over the months. This makes hatching a little bit less stressful and a lot more foolproof when your fingers are frozen in tonight’s New York City winter wind!

We’ll have a sweet update from the Silph Road team about this weekend’s festivities soon, travelers. But in the meantime, we’ve enjoyed going on this teardown roller-coaster with you tonight.

Travel safe,

– Executive Dronpes –