Pokemon Go is a massive drain on phone batteries– when I’m playing, it’s not unusual for me to eat 30% of my battery on a decent walk around my neighborhood. Niantic’s previous game, Ingress, was also a battery hog, and its dedicated players eventually all tend to buy massive external battery packs. Until you, too cave and buy a battery pack so large and heavy you could flatten John Cena with it (like I did– mine is apparently so powerful I cannot bring it on US domestic flights), there are a few settings you can change and a few things you can do to save battery power.
TURN AR OFF
In the app you’ll see a couple sliders hidden on battle and gym screens with the label “AR,” which stands for “Augmented Reality.” Pokemon Go makes use of “augmented reality” when it superimposes Pokemon on video to make it seem like the wild Pokemon you’re catching are out in the real world with you.
I don’t have any specific data on how much power turning all the AR features off will save you, but in my experience, I am using less power now that I’m not turning the camera on every time I want to catch a Pokemon.
I also catch Pokemon more quickly without AR, particularly on buses. If your bus turns a corner, the Pokemon will also rotate around you, because your phone can sense you’re moving. This makes catching Pokemon disruptive, complicated, and (since you’re constantly seeing video) a little more power-hungry. If you turn AR off, the Pokemon will always remain directly in front of you, no matter where your phone is pointing– even at the ground. It makes catching Pokemon a lot faster. I catch Pokemon probably twice as fast without AR on.
TURN THE DANG MUSIC OFF– MULTIPLE TIMES
This is pretty obvious, but yeah: turn the music off! There’s a wrinkle, however: server or app crashes seem to sometimes forget your music settings, so if you want to keep your music off, you’re going to have to constantly go into your settings and turn it off over and over again. I’ve been playing in loud, public places only to realize, too late, that my music has been playing very quietly the whole time since my last app crash.
You can access settings with the gear icon in the top right of the main menu accessible from the Pokeball on the bottom of the map screen.
DON’T PLAY ON THE FREEWAY OR ON THE TRAIN
Pokemon Go carries over a “speed-banning” mechanic from Niantic’s previous game, Ingress. In Ingress, going over about 35 KPH would temporarily block you from taking any in-game actions. This would only last for a few minutes– it’s not a permanent ban.
I’ve seen speedbanning at work in Pokemon Go: I was unable to play at all while traveling at freeway speeds as a passenger in my friend’s car. Playing on the train is also likely to be very hard. Back when I was a heavy Ingress player in the Bay Area, playing on the Caltrain was impossible.
Any time spent trying to play the game at high speeds wastes battery– more than usual, too, since you’ll be moving across large distances and the game will be trying to download map feature information more frequently. Critically: while speed-banned, your egg hatch distances will not increase. (This weekend, I traveled about 200 miles at >60 MPH without gaining a single kilometer on my eggs.) It’s wasted battery power, pretty much. My battery definitely suffered more on the freeway than when I explored on foot.
If you are moving fast and do miraculously see a Pokemon to catch, go for it– once the catch minigame starts, speed won’t affect you in any way.
I have not been able to find any specific figures on how slow you need to go to keep from being speedbanned in Pokemon Go, but I imagine it’s similar to Ingress, which banned map-related actions, like attacking or reinforcing map points, at 35 KPH, and remote maintenance actions– like recharging the energy of your map structures– at around 60 KPH. In Pokemon Go, I have seen some inconsistency between my friend’s Android device and my own iOS device (the apps were updating at different times and registering different catchable Pokemon at different speeds). Since we lack specific data on how this works, a good trick is to watch your character– if your character is walking, it’s all good, but if your character is running or jogging, you’re probably going too fast.
EDIT: A previous version of this article contained a suggestion to download local google maps data. Apparently, Pokemon Go can’t benefit from downloading map data in Google Maps because they do not share map data.
