Does your phone need a gyroscope to evolve Inkay in Pokémon Go?

The Pokémon Go developers at Niantic do their best to bring any material from the original games to the mobile devices. Sometimes, they have to be a little creative for the mechanics to work on a mobile device, and the Pokémon, Inkay, is one of them. Traditionally, when you wanted to evolve this Pokémon, you had to flip your device upside down. When you want to do that in Pokémon Go, you have to do the same thing. However, this feature requires a gyroscope. If your phone can play Pokémon Go and it doesn’t have one, can you evolve Inkay?

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to evolve Inkay if your phone lacks a gyroscope. You’re going to be left out on that front, and from what we can tell, there’s no way to work around it. However, developers Niantic have taken notice of this problem, and are looking to address this in a future patch.

The announcement of the update arrived on September 20, about two weeks or so after Inkay’s release. The arrival of the patch will be arriving in update 0.221. Although we don’t have an exact date for this update, we’re thankful to see that Niantic is actively attempting to find ways to meld previous techniques from the primary Pokémon series to the mobile game, and finding ways to accommodate problems like this.