Anyone experiencing issues while playing Pokémon Go on older versions of their Android phones might want to think about upgrading soon. Niantic confirmed today that the app will discontinue support on 32-bit Android devices in August.
This isn’t exclusive to Pokémon Go, either. Google has already made it clear that the Google Play Store won’t support 32-bit apps at all starting in August 2021.
Niantic is preemptively moving on from supporting older models for multiple reasons, with the biggest one being the ability to streamline the development process of the game without needing to focus on older phones keeping up. Older model phones were notorious for black-screening or overall providing a poor user experience for Go over the last year or so. The more advanced the app was getting, the harder it was for those devices to run it.
By ditching the need for optimizing the game for 32-bit devices, Niantic should be able to overhaul many of the slower parts of the app and improve the experience for all players on 64-bit Android phones and iOS devices.
Of course, this does mean that anyone who has a 32-bit device will be unable to play the game past August without upgrading their phone. But that shouldn’t impact the player base too much because 64-bit devices have become the market standard for mobile phones. Unless someone is scraping the bottom of the barrel for recently-released tech, most phones are already running the more advanced version. And even if they weren’t, 2021 is going to force the market to adapt fully, so an upgrade isn’t that far off anyway.
More details about when support will officially be dropped and any immediate consequences of the change will be released in the coming weeks.
