If you ask anyone what’s missing in Pokemon GO currently they’ll probably tell you that for all it does well, it’s missing necessary social features. You can’t battle your friends right now, you can’t trade Pokemon, other trainers don’t show up on the game map, and for all intents and purposes, it may as well be an entirely single player experience that we’re all collectively taking part in alone simultaneously, but not really together.
Luckily, Omlet Arcade is a free overlay application aiming to fix some of that. While it doesn’t add integral gameplay functions like battling or trading, it does give the game a necessary meta-framework that ties everyone together. For something that’s only available on Android right now in beta, the feature list is actually surprisingly robust. You can see a walkthrough of the features from Alex Hicks, one of the team members at Omlet, in the video above or here on our YouTube.
The app works like an overlay that floats on top of Pokemon GO while you’re playing it. You just tap the icon and it opens up the tray with an assortment of options.
For starters, any time you see a Pokemon spawn or a lure drop in the game world, you can pull up a map and mark the live location. When someone does that, it shows up on a map that you can access from within the app. There is also an option to view the similar third party map found at Pokevision as well.
Additionally, there is a chat function so you can communicate with other players in real-time, as well as the ability to post screenshots, videos, and livestreams. You can not only livestream to the community itself, but even to other apps on your mobile device, like Facebook and Twitch. The fact that all of these features run off of another application, with full support for Pokemon GO, is pretty impressive.
Worth noting is that Omlet Arcade supports other mobile games in addition to Pokemon GO, such as Clash Royale, Minecraft, and more. Adding the OmletSDK to an existing mobile game to allow for its social features is an incredibly simple affair, according to the documentation.
You can download Omlet Arcade for Pokemon GO from the Google Play Store for free right now. Omlet is available for iOS, but Pokemon GO support isn’t out on the iOS App Store yet.
