Habit or Addiction

I logged into Pokemon Go (or PoGo) today before my afternoon walk. I had just become "Forever Friends" with someone and we just completed a remote trade, so when I logged in, I was greeted with my new, Lucky Shiny Cyndaquil! If you remember my Pokemon Heartgold story, Cyndaquil was my starter, and one of my favorite Pokemon of all time. So anyway, this was a great start to my walk.

I walked about 1.5 miles (the usual) all while playing PoGo, which I think was around 45 minutes. I completed 3 routes, defeated an evil Team Rocket grunt, took over a gym, and caught dozens of Pokemon. And the walk felt like a breeze. I sat down on my chair outside and begin to flip through the huge haul of Pokemon and items that I came home with, sorting them out and clearing up unnecessary items from my inventory.

It was about 15 minutes, or maybe even 30 before I went back inside. The weather was nice and sunny, but not too warm, so it was perfect to sit outside. But when I came back in ultimately for an afternoon snack, I didn't realize how much time had passed. That moment kind of "reset" my brain and I realized how long I spent on all the "overhead" tasks (like clearing up inventory) in PoGo rather than enjoying my walk. In fact, I didn't really look up from my phone much during my walk either.

As I sat down at my desk to write, I went through the settings in my phone. It tracks some statistics for all the apps I have, so I know how much time I've spent on the app, how much battery it used, and more. So, let's start with the time spent on the app.

Time Spent on Pokemon Go

Weekday	Duration
Saturday	0:00
Sunday	0:52
Monday	0:40
Tuesday	1:11
Wednesday	1:08
Thursday	0:48
Friday (today)	1:16

Not counting last Saturday, I averaged about 1 hour per day on this app. That's about 4% of the total day or over 6% of my waking hours. It's not crazy, but that's still a sizable chunk of my day that I spent, or lost, to PoGo, depending on how you want to think about it.

I'm always complaining that I don't have enough time for [insert chore or other activity here]. Without PoGo, I basically would gain an extra hour to my day, every day!

Battery

So, I already knew that PoGo saps my battery like crazy. After a 30 minute walk, I have to put my phone on charge if I plan to go out later that day. For my walk today, PoGo sapped 15% of my phone's battery. That's 1% every 5 minutes! To me, that actually seems like a lowball estimate, because that rate would indicate I could have PoGo running on my phone for over 8 hours before the battery dies. That is absolutely false. I expect I could maybe get like 3 or 4 hours of continuous gameplay.

Storage

This is kind of a hidden cost. The app installation itself is only 581MB (at the time of writing.) However, it's storing about 78MB in the cache, and 1.92GB in data! That's right - the total size of PoGo on my phone's storage is a whopping 2.58GB! For a mobile game, that's a lot!

Mobile Data

This isn't as important as virtually every modern phone plan offers unlimited talk, text, and data at this point, but this is a pretty crazy one.

Month	Data Usage
January	430MB
February	759MB
March	793MB
April	277MB	Apr. 1st-17th
April	488MB	Extrapolated

Back in the day, when I first got a smartphone, I think my plan was about 1GB per month of data, which was a pretty generous plan. For the months of January and April, about half would have gone to PoGo, and for February and March, that would have almost all gone to PoGo.

However, I feel like it's known that PoGo is a very data-hungry game. You can't even start the game without an internet or cell connection.

Notifications

This also has a cost. I'm not the kind of person that will jump to grab my phone whenever there's a notification, but of course everyone at least will glance at them when they are looking at their phone. (This may even be something as little as it popping up on your lock screen.)

Weekday	Notifications
Saturday	25
Sunday	8
Monday	10
Tuesday	15
Wednesday	22
Thursday	12
Friday (today)	10

10 to 20 notifications per day is overwhelming! Not to mention these will also slowly leak your phone's battery by emitting light, noise, or vibrations. Also, did you notice that Saturday, the day where I didn't pick up the game at all, is the day I received the most notifications? I think that is disgusting.

Conclusion

I cleared the cache and data, and uninstalled Pokemon Go. Will I come back to it? Probably. As far as games go, at least this one incentivizes you to go outside for a walk. But I was just spending so much more time and resources on it than I expected, which is the main reason it had to go.

I'll probably download it again. I mean, when I tried to get myself off Reddit, I ended up just going on Reddit through my phone's browser, which probably wasted me even more time. Eventually though, I stopped using it completely and haven't looked back since. Just the thought of browsing through Reddit makes me shudder. It's mildly interesting at best and enraging at worst.

Pokemon Go is similar. It's got its high points, but they are followed by a long process of cleaning up your inventory, opening and sending gifts to friends, and watching all those dang animations. I mean come on, why can't we skip all those animations? Let's see how long I can last without it! Maybe it'll turn into a "Reddit" for me one day too.