So in this day in age transparency reigns supreme, as it should. Niantic has been radio silent as of day one with their game and are almost collapsing from the inside. They are making constant decisions that make you scratch your head. The entire premise and advertisement of the game is to track down your favorite Pokemon with the game's built in tracking system. A game that tracks pokemon, now has no means whether ingame or third party to track the pokemon is a change in game function. The update changed how the main game is played in terms of tracking
Players who clearly love the Pokemon name and this game went out of their way to take the source code the game uses with Google Map's API to create websites that track pokemon in your area when Pokemon GO's in game system was disabled do to instability issues. Niantic's CEO considered this cheating and handed out some cease and desist letters to these third party developers which shut them down. The crazy bit is you can cheat in this game like made through GPS Spoofing, but that hasn't been mentioned or corrected. This was their only communication to the player base since launch. What I presume to be the nail in the coffin was their latest update that removed the function to even see nearby pokemon, now making it totally rng based to even see your favorites or to run into specific pokemon.
Niantic Labs could go down in history by absolutely bombing a brand that sells itself. People should learn that some news, even bad is better than no news at all.