We've received a notice to cease and desist from Niantic Labs, and I've decided to comply with their requests. It was my intention to augment and improve the game experience of Pokemon Go, and we achieved just that! Without their blessing, I don't see myself having the motivation to continue this project.
It grew from a 2 hour weekend project to a robust 2-click server ready-for-deployment in a matter of days. The project has inspired ~5 million views (500k uniques), 44k clones, 9.6k stars, 160 contributors, translation into 10 languages, and a wonderful community all in the span of 2 weeks. It's also been featured on The Verge, Arstechnica, Lifehacker, Stern.de, Business Insider, and many others. What was most exciting was seeing the hundreds of online community-run maps in towns and cities across the world. Some coffee shops even hosted copies for their own customers!
It's been my pleasure to get to know each of you guys: the core development team, the contributors, and the thousands that have gotten in touch with me! Niantic, my offer still stands to help you build an official game map!
-Ahmed Almutawa
Thank you all for the kind words and offers of help! I'd like to clarify that the main reason I chose to shut it down was because I didn’t want to personally give Niantic any more traffic or to further supplement their game experience. Their actions towards 3rd party developers have been very off-putting and they’ve killed my personal motivation to work on this. This was a fun weekend project for a game I enjoyed, and I’ve lost interest in both. That said, you can't really kill open source projects by shutting down 1 repo.