A big facet of Pokémon is trading — exchanging Pokémon you might want with others who might not have the same Pokémon. It’s a feature we’ve come to expect from countless generations of handheld Pokémon games. And Niantic agrees — we saw trading promoted in the Pokémon GO Trailer. Yet, when the game released, the feature was mysteriously absent. But not for long, it seems!

The folks at Pokémon GO Hub have found code from the latest GO update that suggests trading will be coming soon. Their summary of what they found from Pokémon GO’s 0.37.1 APK suggests:

• You are able to search for “Trading Players”
• You are able to create, cancel and complete Trade Offers
• You can currently trade only Pokemon
• No info on the visibility and range of Trade Search – it’s too early to say if you’ll be able to trade worldwide or not
• The trading seems resilient to “connection loss” and will retry once the connection is available again
  • It’s inconclusive what type of connection trading will use…
    • … although it does communicate with the server side to load Trade offers and responses

Their detailed analysis of the code is worth a read.

Since the feature hasn’t been announced by Niantic yet, the broader details of how it all works isn’t yet known. However, we can look forward to trading Pokémon (but not items) with other players. It’s not certain how we’ll be able to start the trades — whether it’s by friend lists or just to anyone nearby. The Buddy Pokémon feature was found by data mining the APKs for information — and was revealed in the update shortly thereafter. That there’s trading code here suggests that the feature is imminent, so we can perhaps look forward to the feature being revealed in the next update.

Are you excited about trading? What will you trade?

Thanks to El Héroe Oscuro for the tip!
Source: BGR
Further reading: Pokémon Go Hub