If you play Pokemon Go (like the rest of the planet) but don’t have the time to catch them all, worry no more! With the Poké Radar from Dutch startup Digitalisma, it becomes easy to find the pocket monsters. With the app, players can add the location on a crowdsourced map where they caught the Pokémon so other users can find them as well. With over 250.000 downloads in under a week for the Android version, it’s an unsuspected hit.
Digitalisma
Digitalisma, the Dutch company behind the app, normally works on B2B apps. “We developed Poké Radar just for the fun of it,” Digitalisma co-founder Ingmar Vroege says. “We got the idea to develop the app when we were playing Pokémon Go quite fanatically for a whole weekend. It became annoying when we kept on catching Pidgeys, Rattata’s and other common Pokémon, so we decided to build an app to find out the specific location of Pokémon. We were quite surprised that it became so popular so quickly – currently we have 5000 new users every hour.”
Poké Radar / Poké Radar
There might be a small explanation for the sudden surge of new users, though: an American company already developed an app with the same name and underlying idea. “We both worked on the same idea without knowing it,” Vroege explains. “They were one step ahead of us in the Appstore, but we were first to publish in the Google Playstore. Their app has been removed from the Google Playstore because of the duplicate name, so it’s safe to say we are also profiting from their traffic.”
Revenue model
If the unsuspected success also has some kind of monetary value, Vroeger can be frank: “We are making some money out of it, primarily from advertisements. We are now working on some bug fixed and small additions, but to make a real revenue model we need to push our retention to stay ahead of the competition.
Poke Radar is available for iOs and Android.