[General Questions and Answers] rahulbanerjee1992:
I have been wondering a lot, and testing out different apps and functions to try and pin point what is it exactly that Niantic is tracking on Android, because of which they are able to shadowban spoofers on Android, but can't when the players on iOS do the exact same thing.

These are the things I tested:

1. Used magisk manager to hide root access, so Pokemon GO shouldn't be able to detect root access at all. If it would have detected, the game would have stopped working, so no guesses needed here.

2. Testing whether enabling Developer Options>Mock Locations is creating their red warning trigger. I have tested with both situations:

i) Developer Options>Mock Locations ON:

We can select a fake GPS app to use this feature, and spoof. The game works fine.

ii) Developer Options>Mock Locations OFF:

We can disable this feature, and use certain apps such as 'Fake GPS Pro', which has a 'root mode' in their settings menu, enabling us to spoof without mock locations.

3. Whether they are checking the if we have any fake gps app which is listed in the store, to spoof, by scanning our installed apps. For testing this, I used an app called 'Fake GPS Joystick' which has an inbuilt app cloner, thus allowing us to change the app name and install the same app again under a different package name, and then uninstall the original app.

4. Whether they are tracking the IP address to check whether the IP used at a particular geolocation during spoofing corresponds to the IP address of that particular country. I have used VPNs to alter my IP addresses(to match corresponding countries) when spoofing to different geolocations.

5. Whether a specified number of soft bans(by changing extremely distant locations in less than 2 hours) ultimately leads to a red warning shadowban. I have tried this process on both iOS and Android. I have shifted countries in less than 2 hours, causing the pokemons to flee, and pokestops to not work. Even after that, on iOS, no shadowban was triggered, but on Android, shadowban was triggered.

6. Whether they are checking in-game locations.. for example, if you are in Japan and move to Australia after 2 hours it is a red flag logically. This should be easy to track because all Pokemons that you catch have their catch location listed under it. If they track this, they can simply calculate the distance between the last activity and the next activity, but the game doesn't track this(different activities across different countries with a gap of 2 hours) because accounts doing this over and over again on iOS has triggered no ban.

7. Whether Android security patches have something to do with getting shadowbans. I have tried using 2017 and 2018 patches. In both situations, shadowban was noticed, so tracking using security patches seems irrelevant.

Off the top of my head, I have used these tests, individually, and also together, in both cases, all accounts have been shadowbanned on Android, but completely fine on iOS.

P.S. I don't care much for the game, but I am intrigued to know how the company tracks and imposes these bans.

If you have any info/comments, please help figure out their banning mechanism. :)