The Pokémon Apps We Actually Use (And the One That Stuck)

Somewhere along the way our phones picked up a whole shelf of Pokémon apps. We didn't plan it, it just sort of happened, because every corner of this hobby has a digital version now. Some of them we open every single day. Some of them we open twice a year and feel a little guilty about it.

So here's an honest accounting of which companion apps we actually use, which ones stuck, and which ones are sitting there waiting on us to have more free time.

Pokémon GO: the one we keep meaning to play more

We open Pokémon GO from time to time and we are not serious about it by any stretch. We'll pop it open to catch whatever happens to be wandering around, take on a Team Rocket challenge, and see what special event is running that week. That is genuinely the whole of it.

We haven't gotten organized enough to show up for a scheduled community event, and we've barely touched gyms or raids. We'd like to do more with it, because it's the app that most obviously turns into a family outing if you let it. Finding a Saturday that lines up with an event is just harder than it sounds right now, so for the moment we catch what walks past us and leave it at that.

Pokémon TCG Pocket: the one that actually stuck

This is the one that has us the way real cards do.

Two free packs a day means Collector R gets one and Collector Sis gets one, and that small ritual has quietly become part of the evening. They're filling in sets in there the same way we're filling binders on the shelf, which is the part we didn't see coming. It scratches the identical itch, just without the shipping and without the shelf space.

The apps that stuck around are the ones that feel like the binder, not the game.

The trading and the battling have turned out to be a bonus. It's been a low-stakes way for the kids to pick up how the TCG actually works, which matters in this house because we're collectors first and players almost not at all. Nobody's stressing over a misplay when the whole thing took four minutes.

The sneaky best part has been the Pokédex education. Between the two of them the kids now recognize a pile of Pokémon that we would have had no shot at naming a year ago, which is a running theme for us since coming back to Pokémon after stepping away at Gen 2. A card like Porygon-Z is a good example. It would have meant nothing to us not long ago, and now it gets recognized on sight.

Pokémon TCG Live: the code scanner

Honest answer here. We open Pokémon TCG Live when we open packs, and basically never otherwise.

We scan the code cards, watch what comes up in the app, and enjoy the second little pack opening that we already paid for. That part is genuinely fun and it costs nothing extra. Outside of that we don't use it much, because we aren't into playing the TCG directly yet.

That "yet" is doing some work in that sentence. If the kids keep learning the game over in Pocket, this is probably the next place it goes.

The official Lorcana app: our binder guide

Over on the Disney side, the official Lorcana app has quietly turned into our reference tool. Having the full card list in one place is the entire value for us.

When a new Lorcana set gets announced, that's the first place we go to scroll the whole thing and see which cards are calling our name before any of it hits shelves. We use it as a guide for what we're building toward in the binders, and honestly for just admiring cards from sets we enjoyed. It's less of a game to us and more of a catalog, and we're completely fine with that, especially since we've been leaning into Lorcana while things are quiet.

Tip: when a set gets announced, scrolling the full card list in the app before preorders open is the cheapest way to figure out what you actually want. It's a lot easier to skip the hype when you've already decided which three cards you're chasing.

TCGplayer: the one that isn't a game at all

TCGplayer is everyone's go-to at this point. If you need to know what a card is worth, you're either looking up recent eBay sales, looking it up on TCGplayer, or doing some combination of both and meeting in the middle. It's always a solid first stop to see where the market sits on something.

Lately it's been doing a slightly different job for us. We've been running our duplicates and our hits from sets we aren't actively chasing through it to see which ones carry real weight, because those are exactly the cards that could turn into the missing hits in the binders we do care about. That's the same thinking behind how we decide between ripping sealed and just buying the singles.

The one thing none of them did

None of these replaced the binder. If anything they made the binder better, because now the kids pull a card out of a real pack and already know the Pokémon on it from a phone screen. That's a trade we'll take.

But there's a gap we kept running into. Every one of these apps is good at its own job, and not one of them knows anything about the binders actually sitting on our shelf. Pocket fills its own sets. TCG Live knows what we scanned. TCGplayer knows what things cost. Not one of them could tell us which cards we still needed to finish a page.

So we built that part ourselves. Our set binder and trade tools are the version we wanted: pick a set, tap the pockets you own, watch the gaps close, and see which of your dupes could turn into the cards you're still missing. It's free to start with your first set, there's nothing being sold to you, and it exists because we needed it before anybody else did.

You can also follow our binders and watch ours fill in as we go, which is either motivating or mildly stressful depending on the week. And if you've got an app that earned a spot on your home screen and we didn't mention it, we want to hear about it. Come tell us over on YouTube, or tag us on X @Adventure_Coll.