Short answer: you choose. Pokémon GO doesn't hold pending gifts in one dated queue that opens oldest-first. Each friend who sent you a gift shows a gift icon next to their name in the Friends tab, and you open it by tapping into that friend's entry. There's no forced order - you can open whichever friend's gift you want, whenever you want, skipping the rest.
Trainer school
Can you choose which gift to open in Pokémon GO, or do they open in order?
It looks like it should work like an inbox - newest or oldest on top, work through it in order. It doesn't. Here's how gift opening actually works, and why that matters.
Where a pending gift actually lives
Gifts aren't collected in a single list at all. Niantic's own help center describes it this way: friends with a pending gift show a gift icon and the date it arrived, right next to their name in your Friends tab. To open one, you tap into that specific friend's profile, tap the gift, then tap Open. The date next to the icon tells you how long it's been sitting, but it's just information - it doesn't put the gift in a line.
That means the "oldest gift" and the "gift you're about to open" are two completely independent ideas. You can have a gift that's been waiting three days sitting untouched while you open one that arrived an hour ago, with the game never objecting.
No FIFO, no bulk opening
Two things follow from gifts living per-friend rather than in a shared bag:
- No fixed order. There's nothing to skip or queue-jump, because there's no queue. Opening a friend's gift has zero effect on any other friend's pending gift.
- No opening in bulk. Each gift is opened individually, friend by friend - there's no "open all" action. If you have a long friend list, this is also the reason there's a daily cap on how many you can get through at all.
Why this matters for your routine
This is exactly what makes the triage step in the 2-minute daily routine possible: when you're close to the 30-gift opening cap for the day, you can deliberately work through friends nearing a friendship level-up first, since one of today's opens is about to pay out a much bigger XP chunk than the rest. If gifts opened in a forced order, that kind of prioritizing wouldn't be possible at all.
The caps around opening and holding gifts are unchanged by any of this - you're still limited to 20 gifts held at once (more at higher Trainer Levels) and 30 opened per day; see the full gifts & postcards breakdown for the complete numbers.
FAQ
Does opening order change what's inside a gift? No - contents are random from the gift's item pool regardless of which friend's gift you open first, last, or not at all that day.
Can I tell how old a pending gift is before opening it? Yes - the date it arrived shows next to the gift icon on that friend's entry in your Friends tab.
If I never open a friend's gift, does it expire? Niantic hasn't published an expiration rule for an unopened gift sitting in your Friends tab - treat it as waiting indefinitely until you open it or until your own gift bag fills up.
Is there a "open all" button for a big friend list? No - every gift is opened one at a time, friend by friend. That's also why the 30-gift daily opening cap is the ceiling most active players with a large list actually hit, not the 20-gift bag.
Need more friends to open gifts from in the first place? One tap on the front page gives you a fresh, unused trainer code, or browse codes by country if you're filling out a specific region.