'Pokémon Go' News, Rumors: Niantic Quietly Ditches Google Maps for OpenStreetMap?
"Pokémon GO" players have begun to notice something different in their in-game maps, and it's not just their imagination. Niantic has started to switch the game over from Google Maps to the open-source alternative, OpenStreetMap.
Fans on Reddit who have been closely following the changes have noted that the conversion has been fast-paced, with Niantic porting over countries starting from South Korea in February.
The bulk of the conversions seem to have started in Australia on Nov. 28, and quickly spread to New Zealand, India, East Asia and South East Asia by the start of this month. Most of the rest of the "Pokémon Go" regions quickly followed, from almost all of Europe, South Asia, South Africa, and both North and South America.
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The rollout pulled data from varying updates of OpenStreetMap, an open source mapping project that also takes in and records crowdsourced information. It lets users submit new data on locations, as Polygon noted, so there may be areas that will look different when compared to the same place in Google Maps.
There has been no official announcement from Niantic as of this time, and all the details that are publicly known about this new change all came from "Pokémon Go" players themselves. Some of the players found their detailed parts of the town suddenly empty, while others found that their neighborhood became more detailed in-game.
The new map uses the OpenStreetMap August 2017 data to render the areas in-game, but so far, no one has reported changing spawn locations, encounters or nests. Other players who added swimming pools to the OpenStreetMap found that they encountered water biome Pokémon after their change got included, as well.
