Addressing Rural Areas

Well you can request pokestops, and gyms... however I think that feature may be temporarily closed. They don't have much reason to make rural accessible since most of the population lives in large cities.

I would imagine it would be too time consuming to address such large areas, but they could dramatically reduce ball prices and/or have a daily login bonus of a few items. Wouldn't impact urban players in the least but would be a massive boon to rural players.

Adding random spawns in dead areas may be a little easier for them. Here's to hoping:)

There was an effort for ingress in wich players (L16 only) were evaluating new portal (what became pokestops and gyms in pokemon go) submisions to see if they would become actual portals and eventually pokestops/gyms, I remember in a video from trainer tips, he said one of those players stated most of the portals he had to evaluate were in rural areas, so hope has not been lost.

Edit: The name of the program is Operation Portal Recon

Try to keep this in mind:

Niantic is literally a group of 20-30 people.

That's like if one of your classes in school got together and decided to create an app.

Now think about the fact that each stop needs to be placed manually, as well as assigned spawn probabilities/etc. At the minimum, even if they crowdsource suggestions for spots, these need to be reviewed.

Ok, now just think for a second about the size of the Earth. Counting only hospitable territory (so taking out Mountains, oceans, deserts, etc) there are about 25,000,000 miles to cover.

Let's say your class divided up that area. That means each of you would cover about 1 million square miles of area. So a country like the US would be split between 3-4 people.

If you were tasked with this, where would you start? Would you start with Bubbletown, Indiana? Home to the world's largest golf cart and 400 people? Or are you going to start with something like NYC where any given day 20 million people can be found a few square miles.

Listen, it sucks. I get it. But it's not like they're sitting around hating on rural players. I'm sure they would like if every possible person in the country has access to gyms/stops/ etc. b/c it means more engagement and more revenue. But It would simply be impossible for them to have done that without sacrificing somewhere.