I don’t go to the specifics but I’ve met with people from Niantic and I can say they never really cared that much about cheating. WalkScape uses quite sophisticated anti-cheat and PoGo was always more interested in GPS spoofing anyhow when step data cheating is way easier to detect.

We use specific APIs when you use your steps from smart watches etc. so we can detect exactly where they’re coming from and we have a whitelist & blacklist systems for that in place so any weird apps will immediately get blacklisted and players using such banned permanently from the game.