Well it’s not fancy and it doesn’t feature any new information but if you’re playing Pokemon and you need instant, super quick access to information about a Pokemon character, this might be of interest. It’s an Australian developed iOS app that basically transforms your iPhone into a Pokedex.
The app is called Oak and it’s free, with a slightly irritating caveat. The base, free version of the app only provides information on the original 151 pokemon. To unlock all of the information you have to pay a $5.49 fee, which seems a bit unfair considering all the information is available in multiple places online.
I guess what you’re paying for here is the convenience, and for the clean, simple, easy to read interface and design. If you’re looking for quick easy access to info whilst playing, this might be quite useful!
Comments
7 responses to “This Australian Pokemon App Turns Your iPhone Into A Pokedex”
Woah that’s steep
If they’ve entirely compiled the information themselves, charge away. If it’s republishing information that has been put together by dedicated communities on a voluntary basis, such as serebii and bulbapedia, I’d expect to see full acknowledgement of source and royalties contributed to help keep that site running.
According to the app reviews, it seems to be missing a fair bit of information – including pictures of the actual Pokémon; I suppose if they were included they would not be able to charge for it at all.
That said, for me a Pokédex app won’t be worth even considering until I can point my phone’s camera at a picture of a Pokémon and it returns the ‘dex entry for it.
Wouldn’t it be worth investigating whether this application data source is in question or not? what affiliation does this person or their group have with the dominant sites of pokemon information?
I’m all for supporting community built applications affiliated with well known sites but there’s no information on that for this application (it’s very ambiguous).
As soon as that dollar value was assigned there, I just didn’t like it, I’d pay for a community project any time of the day but for all I can assume, this could be a bloke who writes a bot to extract information from sites.
I mean really, is this worth the publicity or is it because it’s developer is an Australian and we should remove all doubts and support what maybe the battling everyday man or woman?
Good point. The fact is, if you have a phone that can run this app, you have a phone that can access a number of websites that have all this information and more.
I’m an Aussie who made an iOS Pokédex app a few years ago as well (http://www.ubergames.net/projects/ipokedex). Luke Plunkett even featured it on Kotaku at one point. (Still one of the best days of my life! ^_^)
Sadly, after the app was up for a few months, I was contacted by one of the lawyers at The Pokémon Company over in Washington and asked (incredibly politely) to take it down. Turns out that regardless of the content, while they haven’t got a problem with fan websites, they do have a problem with fan apps. I’m guessing it may be because apps are products that could easily be confused as official ones (Especially now that there IS an official one!) and websites are very obviously discrete fan-made services.
Either way, I still firmly believe that if you’re going to try making a Pokémon app like this, you should never charge money for it (Mine was free. XD). Unless you specifically went through the games and extracted all of the info yourself, you’re using someone else’s hard work to get ahold of the data in the first place. I know both Bulbapedia and Veekun don’t appreciate people selling the content they’ve provided (for free no less) and even less if that person tries to cover up where they even got that content from.
But not even considering that, The Pokémon Company REALLY don’t appreciate third parties profiting off the Pokémon brand without authorisation, so that’s definitely something they should be aware of.
Best Android Pokedex
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tildegame.pokedex
costs 0.99c and is perfect