Go-tcha Evolve 4+

I’m on my first gotcha evolve and I've had it for about a month now. I've previously owned 3x gotcha generation 1 and I must have caught close to a 100k pokemon and spun more than 100k stops/gyms using these devices. In my view it is a must-have-accessory for someone playing Pokemon Go frequently. It deals with some of the boring aspects of the game and catches "trash" (you can never have enough stardust) and spins stops/gyms without you having to invest time in it. It will also allow you to be active in the game while doing things that would otherwise prevent play; biking, driving a car in inner-city traffic, watching a movie, hanging out with a friend etc. You get the picture.

If you google for reviews of the Gotcha Evolve (or the gen 1 Gotcha for that matter) you will find that it typically gets one of two grades; 1 or 5. The people who assign it the grade 1 talk about serious connection issues, typically that the device keeps disconnecting (sometimes already after minutes of use) or that it has issues with pairing with the phone. The once who assign it a 5 focus on the work it does when properly paired.

Based on my own experience, I can confirm the reports of disconnection issues, especially with my Evolve but they were also there with the gen 1 gotchas. There are days when my gotcha stays connected the full hour, but most of the time it disconnects within 10 minutes and sometimes just a couple of minutes. This also happens in what should be perfect connectivity conditions where my gotcha is lying still on a table just centimetres from my phone. I’ve seen speculations that the gotcha has a very weak Bluetooth signal. If this is true or not is hard to say, but I can confirm the disconnection issues are very real.

The idea behind the gotcha products are clearly 5-star ideas, but unfortunately the product cannot deliver a 5-star experience. This being said, I’m not entirely convinced this can be blamed on Datel Electronics. To elaborate, as many of you know there is Niantic product called the “Niantic Pokemon Go Plus”. It is basically the same as a gotcha, but it is ugly, it vibrates weather you want it to or not and worst of all; it only catches or spins provided you physically press a button. For this device to work, Niantic had to create a programming interface in the game so that the Pokemon Go Plus and the game could communicate. The interface was designed with a number of intended restrictions, for example that only red balls can be used and that catching pokemon will always be prioritised over spinning stops/gyms. I’m convinced that it was never Niantics intention to open up for a 3:rd party market, it was an unintended side effect of creating a product of their own. One indication of this is that a gotcha identifies itself as a Niantic Pokemon Go Plus in the game. The people at Datel realised that there would be a market for a product which did not force the player to press a button to catch / spin and managed to reverse engineer the programming interface and create their own competing product. A challenge for Datel is that they cannot override the restrictions of programming interface regardless of how many requests they get to from the community to improve the product to use great balls or ultra balls. It also means that when Niantic upgrades Pokemon Go they never regression test to ensure continued functionality in the gotcha. Niantic cannot fully shut down the gotchas as this would also impact all the Niantic Pokemon Go Plus devices in the world, but perhaps they have found a more subtle way of sabotaging for their competitor? The game should send a disconnection instruction to the device every 60 minutes, this is by design for a Pokemon Go Plus. Perhaps Niantic have found a way to send disconnection instructions for devices identified as non-Niantic hardware?

A fantastic device which I cannot live without but prepare yourself to reconnect it often!

The device isn’t working any longer since I’ve updated my iPhone 12 Pro Max to iOS 16.1

Purpose of the device and app is to allow auto catch, however, as many others have reported, the device/app keeps disconnecting, so you have to manually intervene anyway, so what’s the point?

Despite what some others misleadingly claim also, the app will ONLY use standard Pokeballs and NOT great balls etc, which is a bit crap.

1/3 times of opening the app as well it will just crash.

The device itself is also a load of rubbish. Who on earth thought that charging solution was a good idea!?!? Worst charging solution I’ve ever seen and the risk of breaking the port while taking it out of the strap is very high.

Don’t buy this device or use the app.