Moving your Pokémon from one game to another has always been a complicated process, and The Pokémon Company has gone to great lengths to try to streamline it by creating the Pokémon Home app, which acts as a centralized storage system. But before that, there was a pair of 3DS apps called Pokémon Bank and Poké Transporter that allowed you to transfer Pokémon from your DS to your 3DS, which would make it possible to move Pokémon as far back as the Game Boy Advance games, or to a system as modern as the Switch 2. Now, The Pokémon Company has announced it’s officially ending support for the apps.
The Pokémon Company announced this alongside confirmation that the FireRed and LeafGreen Switch ports that launched earlier this year will get Home support in October, allowing you to transfer Pokémon you capture in the GBA games to any other game that can connect to the app. Bank will end its service on February 25, 2027, at 7 p.m. Pacific/10 p.m. Eastern. The announcement urges anyone who has Pokémon they want to carry over to do so before the end of service, but also, it’s worth noting that Bank is not currently available to download, as the 3DS’ online systems were shut down in 2024. So that means that even if you wanted to use the system before next February, you can only do it if you already have the app redeemed on the eShop from before 2024.
I can’t imagine Pokémon Bank is getting any meaningful use in 2026, especially as those older games have become so impossible to find and play on old hardware. But it is still the end of an era. As video games lean harder on digital distribution and online servers, Bank feels like a relic of a time when Pokémon were trapped on cartridges unless you dealt with some really obtuse transfer methods like having to put both your GBA game and your DS game in the same system at once so you could capture old friends in new games. Game Freak had fun with transporting Pokémon over the years, but these methods are pretty cumbersome, especially compared to the relative simplicity of Home.
Serebii Update: Pokémon Bank will stop working and being able to connect to Pokémon HOME on February 26th 2027. Pokémon will not be able to stored any longer in it and it cannot connect to Pokémon HOME after that dayhttps://t.co/NWlAdn57aQ pic.twitter.com/moEivdS5W2
— Serebii.net (@SerebiiNet) August 13, 2026
The ability to transfer Pokémon from one game to another has become less of an expected feature ever since Sword and Shield stopped allowing players to trade any Pokémon they wanted to the next game, which was a huge controversy in the community known colloquially as “Dexit.” Despite online protests, Game Freak seems pretty set on not bringing back the National Dex that would include every Pokémon in each game. Many players have used Bank to transfer Pokémon that they caught decades ago to modern games, and now it feels like a lot of history is about to be cut off from the present. It’s sad that this app, the last bridge connecting old hardware to current ones, is going away.
Additionally, when the 3DS servers shut down, Pokémon Bank and Transporter were the only apps and services that maintained online functionality, so with this announcement, the 3DS’ online usage is finally going away for good.
