Pokemon Go Update Causing Phantom Vibrations on iPhones September 4, 2023

Since Friday, iPhone owners of many different device models have noticed that their devices were spontaneously vibrating or double vibrating at random instances. It would not matter what program would be running, the device would just vibrate without reason or notification. This can be concerning to users, who could misinterpret random vibrations as device failure. Thankfully, for those of you experiencing this issue, I may have discovered a likely cause, Pokémon Go.

The issues began being reported on Friday. On that same day, Apple released an incremental update for Pokémon Go through the App Store. This update seems to have brought a lot of issues with it. After a lot of troubleshooting, I discovered that the phantom vibrations coincided with respawn notifications. The problem was vibrations were still going off when the program was supposed to be minimized and completely closed out.

The purpose of this article is to notify the masses of this discovery. At this time the only fix I’ve been able to confirm is to completely delete Pokémon Go until the issue is resolved. Game progress is cloud synced with your account, so as long as you remember your account information, you should be able to resume your in-game progress at a later time. Niantic is aware of the issue and is investigating potential causes.

Pokémon Go is out now for Android and iOS devices.