@VeryNearlyLegendary i have the official go plus+. Without it I’d struggle to play as I live very remotely.
I have a long commute and the Go plus+ allows me to spin stops and catch Pokemon without looking at my phone. So I can do these things while driving. It does reset after an hour but you can simply touch the symbol on the pogo screen to switch it on again.
It is expensive (I paid £50 I think) and it is annoyingly quite noisy. It vibrates and flashes and that can’t be switched off. You can switch off pikachu’s voice when it goes off and on.
I have to switch it off when I’m at work or somewhere quiet like a hospital appointment. I do leave it running when I'm in a noisy waiting room at the hospital but am conscious if it’s quiet that it can be annoying for others so I switch it off then. I also have to put it on something soft with a cushion over it while I’m watching tv and switch it off if I have company as it is annoying loud.
If I’m short on items after an event I can switch it to just spin stops and drive around somewhere with lots of stops and it’ll restock me pretty quickly. I have limited mobility so walking isn’t an option. If you go over 17miles per hour it thinks you are in a car so doesn’t work as well as you’re going to fast to play. So I drive around the 20miles or less limit areas near work or the high street or at the local park etc and it works fine. It does still catch things above this but not so frequently.
I also catch more shinies because it helps me auto catch Pokèmon I wouldn’t have even clucked on otherwise. Yes some flee but I wouldn’t have even seen them without it. It auto catches while I’m raiding or battling or scrolling MN so I can catch more than I would without it.
I also get lots of Pokemon I can trade with ds for extra candy and generally I get one or two lucky trades a day by doing that. I regularly max out trading which is time consuming but I’m trying to fill my lucky dex and I have time to kill currently as I have a lot of waiting around for appointments. It was an easy way to spend time while going to appointments where I was there for several hours with no stops or spawn points at that part of the hospital.
Mine is set to use red balls which is does automatically so it can eat through those and you do have to watch out for maxing out your storage as it will still use a ball even if you can’t catch the pokemon for lack of space. You can set it for the other balls but you physically have to press the button on the go plus for it to use those.
I have a friend who uses the Gotcha catcher and he likes it. I believe it’s a bit cheaper.
Technically it is 3rd party which is against pogo rules. However so many players use it they’d loose a huge chunk of income the player base if they banned people from using it. It is something to consider though.
I’m a rule follower and can afford the official one so I stick with that. I have a spare just in case becayse we got through a few of the old wristband versions and after a while they couldn’t be replaced easily. I’ll get myself a second spare at some point as I find the game really difficult to play without the easy access to items I get from having it. Need two for mine and ds’s account.
In essence it depends on what you can afford, if you pass lots of stops you wouldn’t be able to spin otherwise and how much time you spend on pogo. I regard it as a hobby and spend some money on the game accordingly. I can no longer do my previous hobby that would get me out exploring and the go plus+ facilities me being able to play as I want too without worrying about running out of items.