So Pokémon Go reached Denmark as well, and not ever having been part of the Pokémon craze at any point in my life, I was completely unaware of the latest Pokémon developments or this phenomenon until numerous humorous references kept rising to the top on reddit.com/r/funny. Actually I confess I purchased a deck of Pokémon trading cards for my son a few years ago, and briefly acquainted myself with the rules. But the kid was more interested in trading a few cards back and forth with his friends, and playing with some plastic miniatures he already had, so I quickly dropped that knowledge from my active memory. Since I am getting older, like my old Nexus tablet i continuously have to purge active memory, to keep it just barely useful.
Anyway back to Pokémon Go, since I am still the go-to tech guy in my family, the procedure is that I have to figure out how this and any other app is working, with this one preferably before the high pitch whining and pestering from the my kids, became unbearable. I installed the app on my own iPhone. I am not an Apple Guy, I literally end up in furious rage every time I have to do the simplest action on one of those units that goes beyond the apple universe. Copy or move a file to my PC, share with non apple phones, copy a contact, anything you name it I have been annoyed with apple over it. Unless I drink the apple cool aid all the way, owning an apple product just seems annoying to me. My iPhone is a company issued phone, not a personal choice, as I still prefer Android Phones. This was however just a test, as the kids have iPhones and since it did not feature any out-of-apple experience, my sanity was safe. I input my date of birth and opted the easy Google login option, and presto it was working, fairly easy it seemed, gameplay was intuitive, boring in my opinion, but straight forward. So I left it at that and deleted the app again.
My daughter and son now had to get the app, but the load and unresponsiveness of the trainer register/login option left them frustrated and they came running back to me. Quickly i realized the Google option was not found on their phones. Why was this? I searched long and wide on the internet and finally I came across the answer, which I will share with you now, since you have endured the lengthy rambling prelude in lieu of finding the answer like I did.
If you input a birthdate in the Pokémon app as my kids did, and it indicates that you are younger than the allowed age of a googleaccount this google login option will not appear.
Fix. The block is locally on the phone, so…
- on Android, easy peasy, clear the cache of the app, and type a new birthdate.
- on iOS, nothing is easy here since there is no option on iPhone or iPad to clean a specific app’s cache unless you uninstall it entirely from your device, so that is what i did. And then typed in a new birthdate.
So there you have it, gotta catch them all.