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How to Turn Battle Challenges With Friends On or Off in Pokémon GO

By Freedom251 Team · · 3 min read

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Friend battle challenges in Pokémon GO are controlled by a single setting. You turn them on or off in the app’s Settings under General, and turning the option off stops friends from challenging you. Niantic’s help pages use two different names for this option, so the steps below point to what you should look for on your screen.

Turn friend battle challenges on or off

Use the same steps to enable or disable challenges. The option appears under the General section of Settings.

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  1. Open Pokémon GO and go to Settings.
  2. Tap General.
  3. Find the battle-challenge option and check or uncheck it. Niantic’s troubleshooting page names it Allow Battle Challenges with Friends. Its battle guide calls it Battle Challenges from Friends.

Checked means friends can send you Trainer Battle challenges. Unchecked means they cannot. The label may differ slightly depending on your app version or language, so use the wording that appears on your device.

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What happens when the option is off

Niantic’s help article “Battling Other Trainers” says that turning the feature off stops you from receiving Battle Challenges from friends. Niantic’s troubleshooting page adds that when the option is unchecked, a friend who tries to challenge you sees a message indicating that you are not currently receiving challenges. Your friends are not notified that you turned the setting off; they only see that message when they try to challenge you.

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How to challenge a friend

Niantic’s battle guide describes the route for sending a challenge. The challenge does not require you to be near your friend.

  1. From Map View, open your Trainer Profile.
  2. Open the Friends tab and select the friend you want to battle.
  3. On the friend’s profile, tap the Battle icon.
  4. Tap LET’S BATTLE! to send the challenge.

If you do not see the Battle icon on a friend’s profile, check the troubleshooting steps below before assuming the feature is unavailable.

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If invites or the Battle icon are missing

Niantic’s troubleshooting article, “I’m not seeing Trainer Battle invites or the Battle icon on the Friend screen,” lists checks to run in this order.

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1. Confirm your own setting is enabled

Go to Settings, then General, and make sure Allow Battle Challenges with Friends is checked. A missing invite is most often caused by this option being unchecked on your own account.

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2. Synchronize the device date and time

Set your phone or tablet’s date and time to update automatically from the network so that they match your local time. Niantic lists this as a standard check when invites or the Battle icon do not appear.

3. Check child-account permissions

If the account belongs to a child, a parent or guardian controls whether Trainer Battles and other social features are available. Niantic says these permissions can be enabled or disabled through the applicable portal, and its child-access help article points to two places to check:

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The adult who manages the account should review multiplayer permissions there. Niantic’s child-access article explains how permissions for Friends, Gifting, and Trading are handled for these accounts.

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4. Contact Niantic support

If the problem continues after these checks, Niantic’s troubleshooting page directs players to contact support through the Pokémon GO Help Center.

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Sources and how current this guidance is

The steps above come from Niantic’s official Pokémon GO Help Center. The help pages do not show a version-by-version comparison of menu labels, so the names may change as the app is updated. The search listings for these articles showed relative “last updated” ages of roughly seven months for the battle article, seven months for the troubleshooting article, and about seven months for the child-access article. These are search-result indicators, not confirmed publication dates, so check the help pages directly if you need the most recent wording.

Sources: Niantic, “Battling Other Trainers”; Niantic, “I’m not seeing Trainer Battle invites or the Battle icon on the Friend screen”; Niantic, “How can my child access social features such as Friends, Gifting, and Trading?”

No first-hand testing is implied here. These steps describe what Niantic’s official help pages say, and the exact labels on your device are the final guide.

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