It literally was though. Not a military intelligence tool, but a big business intelligence one.
Niantic was founded by Google and their first product, Field Trip, and their first game, Ingress (a much better-designed game than Pokémon Go, btw) were pretty obviously about gaining geolocation data for Google to improve their products like Maps and Shopping.
Oh man, Ingress was such a better game. I got slightly obsessed with it for a year or two. I had my entire state covered for a couple of days, before one of the nodes or whatever was broken.
Even now they have tools like Scaniverse that create 3D stitches of the space around you that they’ve incorporated into the game. And yeah, Ingress was and is a better game, even if the new UI is annoying.
