Re:Pokémon Go data usage draws attention of House Energy and...
by egypturnash on Thursday July 21, 2016 @03:43AM
(#12135363)
> anyone familiar with [Ingress] should at least have a feel on how much data [Pokemon Go] uses
Most of the people playing Pokemon have probably never heard of Ingress.
I agree that it could use a lot more caching, though!
Re:Pokémon Go data usage draws attention of House Energy and...
by pjc50 on Thursday July 21, 2016 @05:42AM
(#12135775)
The thing is, it's a descendant of Ingress, but it feels like a cheap clone. It seems to be worse in some regards. I think Ingress does cache the photos it uses for portals. Pokemon Go is tremendously resource-hungry; I can play Ingress fine on my Moto G, but PGo's stated memory requirements are far larger, it crashes regularly (about every 5-10 minutes), and it gets very warm in the process. And the Pokedex is completely broken.
...that said, Pokémon Go could sure use a lot more caching. It seems that (didn't confirm with a packet sniffer, but latency says it all), for example, it redownloads all Pokéstop data whenever you visit it. That's IMO utterly ridiculous - a Pokéstop is pretty much a permanent fixture (an ex-Ingress portal), it doesn't change, and the user itself is expected to mostly stay in the same geographical area. I don't see any good reason not to cache at least the visual stuff.
Which brings me to the general problem of the hipstery approach to development - download and redownload everything from Internet ad infinitum, as if everyone had broadband and electricity was free.