So, Pokémon Go has sort of taken over the world! (Especially those areas where it's actually been properly released.) But how do you know where all the PokéStops are?
Pokemon GO is just insane right now. This is in Central Park. It's basically been HQ for Pokemon GO.
One way to find PokéStops is to get ahold of the map from an older game called Ingress – which was produced by the same company, Niantic Labs.
Ingress has some similarities with Pokémon Go, but is a capture-the-flag style game based around finding and holding "portals", using a real-world map. Its userbase was much smaller, but over the course of the last four years or so, those users have been submitting IRL spots that they consider interesting in their areas, which were then turned into portals within the game. Those portals now appear to have been turned into PokéStops, which is why Pokémon Go has such impressive global coverage of locally notable spots.
The global map for Ingress is online, and you can see it here. However, you need to sign up for Ingress first, which requires you to download the app.
You can ignore whether the points are blue or green (as that only applies to Ingress), but almost every single point is now also a PokéStop! So when you zoom in you'll get a pretty accurate map of PokéStops in your area.
It's not quite completely identical – a small number of points have been removed between the two, likely to prevent clusters. But as you can see here, they're mostly the same, and the map is accurate enough to use to find popular areas.
So there's an easy way to find out where you need to go!
