What are good strategies for managing friend development?

I'm currently at 62 friends and, frankly, I'm finding that overwhelming. There is simply no way to keep up with everyone, especially with the cap of opening 20 gifts per day. I haven't ended a day yet without a backlog of at least 24 gifts I can't open.

For now, I'm focusing only on a handful of friends at a time, namely my spouse and a few others with whom I play almost daily. Until Niantic fixes the friendship level sync bug, we're coordinating who does something first each day (the most reliable way to do that is opening a gift). Once that friend levels up, we'll have our sync day and then resume towards the next goal.

I really can't handle the logistics of doing that beyond 4 or 5 people, so that's my main focus now. All other friends will have to level up as it happens through gifts (if we ever get to open them), raids, etc. I imagine once I have achieved Best Friend status with those 4 or 5, I'll see who's the next batch through regular interactions and start focusing on those.

Or, Niantic could fix the level bug and make the gift cap match the maximum number of friends (200), and then we could just play the game without stressing over it. Just a thought.

I've deliberately refrained from adding the regulars I raid/gym with for this reason.

I only friended people whom I am explicitly friends with since these are the people that I foresee trading shinies/legendaries with. I may lose out on premier balls, but I suffer a lot less stress on a daily basis.

Gifts and friend levels are like gym coins. Something that stresses you out daily, but is ultimately irrelevant.

Just wait. Because than u know who u raided with and maybe u also remember some names that opened a gift and than open the other ones at night.

My strategy so far:
I use the nickname feature for the people that I want to send gifts to first. And label them 1. Then when you sort them by “nickname”, those labeled 1 will show up on the top of the list. You can create other groups, label them 2 or 3 etc.

Once I have opened and sent gifts to all the friends nicknamed 1, I then sort by “gifts”. Since these seem to be listed at random I try and look for ones that say “2+days ago” (I have turned off “share recent caught Pokémon with friends” I think it was bogging down my friends list, but that’s just a guess) and open those gifts if I still have not reached my daily limit. I also try and send people who have sent me gifts, return gifts even if I can’t open thiers that day. Everyone else who gets gifts is just kind of at random.

I’m really hoping that there is going to be a lot of updates to managing/sorting friends. I have about 190 friends, but I can rarely scroll through all of them before the system crashes and I have to restart the app. I have no idea who is listed at the bottom of the list. It’s also really annoying that the sent gift arrow shown on friends image only seems to stay on for 24hrs(?). I waste a lot of time looking for people to send gifts too. A count of gifts opened per day would be nice also.

USA guy from Iowa looking for new friends to send gifts back to!

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