For those of you who (somehow) haven't heard of "Pokémon Go" yet, here's a brief description. It's an app where people can walk around to "catch" Pokémon and travel to gyms where they can train their Pokémon to fight.
It literally took the country by storm this weekend. Just one day after launching, it was already making over $1 million per day, and could easily end up making $1 billion per year when it rolls out to more locations, according to the analytics firm AppAnnie. In less than a week, "Pokémon Go" has added $7.5 billion of value to Nintendo, which boosted the company's share price by 23 percent on Monday.
News stations have already reported a lot about this app, and it's insane. Some reports will show dozens of people walking around their communities trying to catch Pokémon. And while the majority of them are around the millennial age group, you will still see plenty of little kids and older adults joining in on the fun.
Numerous people have joked on Twitter that "Pokémon Go" is doing more to fight childhood obesity than Michelle Obama.
If this app keeps up it's popularity, then this joke just might come true. The app forces you to get out of the house to go battle and find new Pokémon. If you just stay home, then you'll find a Pokémon every so often, you'll run out of stuff to do and the app will get incredibly boring. It's causing people to visit landmarks, museums and businesses. It's getting people off the couch and out into the world.
With all the fun, however, comes some decently big problems. For one, people know that they can find players at Pokéstops and Gyms. This has actually resulted in some people getting robbed at gunpoint.
It also causes people to be glued to their phone screens, which results in people not paying attention to their surroundings. Sometimes, Pokéstops and Gyms are in fairly busy public places. Texting and walking is a big enough problem already, just imagine the problems that will arise from people playing this app and walking.
The biggest problem, however, is that by signing up with your Google account, you are basically giving the app full access to your information. While Google and Nintendo are likely to fix that problem, it still presents a huge security risk. We've all seen how easy it is for online information from major companies or governments to get hacked. Hacking an app like this could potentially be easy for some professional hackers. If this app were to get hacked, then your personal information, including passwords, bank information, and address could be leaked. Hopefully Google can work to prevent that from happening.
In the meantime though, it's a fun app to play. If you're comfortable with the risks, then go out there and catch them all!
