What would have been a perfect announcement for April Fool’s Day is indeed not a joke and was announced during the Pokémon 2019 Press Conference: Pokémon Sleep. Yes, that’s right, Pokémon Sleep, an upcoming app for smartphones that revolves around sleeping. Yes, that’s right, sleeping, in real-life.
Just as one of Pokémon GO’s goals was to get its players out into the world and motivating them to be more active, Pokémon Sleep is tackling another important health issue: ensuring people are getting sufficient, restful sleep. There have been many different sleep tracking apps over the past few years, which have the same goal in mind, but having a Pokémon spin to the formula is what Pokémon Sleep is all about.
To accompany this new app is a new piece of hardware akin to the Pokémon Go Plus and the Poké Ball Plus. It’s called the Pokémon Go Plus+, also known as the Pokémon Go Plus Plus. This has all of the same functionality as the original Pokémon Go Plus, but it uses an embedded accelerometer to track your sleep patterns and sends this information to your phone via Bluetooth to keep track of sleeping progress for the purpose of Pokémon Sleep.
No word on what the actual gameplay will entail, as no footage from the app was shown, but the app will be available for mobile devices sometime in 2020, along with the Pokémon Go Plus+.