Buddies are fun and useful in a number of ways, but not all are equal, and there is a value to having a good group of them. The core reasons for Buddies:

- Expression of self and what you are doing is a starting part of it. It can then be a part of bragging (see what I have! or working on). It does have an element of pychological impact on others (I have this big bad Pokémon, I dare you. Or I'm just a wee trainer, please don't hurt me.)

- Evolution: A number of Pokémon require some type of adventuring (many walking, or other) to evolve.

- To gain Candy: Feed your buddy and walk with lets them find their candy along the way often 1 per 3 or 5km of walking.

- To gain Mega Energy: For your Mega Pokémon, walking with them gets you mega energy in parallel with the candy.

- Catch Assist: If your active buddy is Great or better, they will occasionally help you with a Pokémon catch, which can really help on some of those tougher catchs.

- Find Presents: Great or better active buddy will find goodies for you that can be useful.

- Active Best Buddy CP boost: When you are about to go into battle with one of your Best Buddies, make it your current buddy for a CP boost.

- And there is a Medal for how many Best Buddies you have that is nice to have. So if you've already invested in some time evolving a Pokémon, might as well finish them up to be a Best Buddy.

Of course those don't usually all line up together, having you gain candy you don't need, just for an evolution or the Best Buddy medal, and/or really liking the Catch Assist as much as possible. So to manage this, I use three tags as my queues to process my buddies

My Buddy queues:
- BuddyPlay
- BuddyAdventure
- BuddyReady

BuddyPlay: Where all Good buddies start as well as any other not yet Best that you are working on that you don't need to Adventure with. Cycle through Playing and photoing a bunch of these a day to move them forward without needing to actively adventure with them. Good Buddies don't typically give you much of an advantage adventuring with, so might as well train them up to at least the Catch assist out of here before you take them adventuring.

BuddyAdventure: Where all the Great+ buddies you want to actively adventure with, such as for evolution, candy, and/or energy, all with a Catch Assist.

BuddyReady: Where you put your Best Buddies for quick grab when wanting them in battle or the candy/energy boost. Also can be used for buddy candidate when you have too many already in your BuddyPlay queue.

If you only played with and photoed as many Buddies a day as you could, you've have your Platinum 'Best Buddy' medal within 5 years. Some basic math: 300 hearts for Buddy to get all the way to Best Buddy. so two hearts a day, for 20 Pokémon (21 if you get it just right), gets you to 200 Best Buddies in 1500 days, or 4.11 years. Much better than a few decades raising your buddies one at a time. Some have pushed the extreams getting their platinum in 2 years of hard work.

How to start this?
- Create your three tags, or do that on the fly.
- Open your Pokémon listings, tap on the seach bar and select 'See More'. Select 'Buddies', Note how many you have to check you got them all later.
-   select them all or at least all that aren't Best Buddies, and then Tag them with BuddyPlay.
- Then you want to select all your Best Buddies and shift the Tag to BuddyReady, removing any BuddyPlay tags
- Open your BuddyPlay tag, making sure the Best Buddies are out, and compare the numbers of your BuddyPlay plus BuddyReady, with the that total off all Buddies. They should be the same, otherwise find the discrepancy and resolve or account for it.
- If you already know of some of your Buddies being Great or better and you want to adventure with them, change their tags to BuddyAdventure.
 
Then the next depends on how many you have, as you are limited to 20 per day, and your time/inclination.
- Choose your sort order for this run of checking, and then plug through them, making them your active Buddy, play with and photo them, and if they are Great or Ultra, do you need them for Adventuring, if so change their tag to match. Otherwise leave them here in BuddyPlay.
- Make sure they have their 2 hearts and deal with any possible gifts they've picked up before you go to the next one to go through it again. If you can go through a full 20 great, but don't sweat it if you can't, it is just a game after all.
- On the next day, make sure you play and photo before switching Buddies again.
 
How aggressively you hit this is your choice and time availablity. Some days you'll have the time to go through a max buddy swap, and others you may not get any at all. Don't sweet it, just use this as one way to manage your Buddy progression as best suits your situation. Even going though a few most days will get you much further than if you mono progress one Buddy at a time.

Now in all this, do remember to fit in an approprate Buddy in the cycle for Adventuring, and where in the day's worth of this cycle will depend on your schedual. I usually use the mix of some play+photo in the morning, with some adventuring during the day, followed by using the rest of my Buddy swaps before midnight. You will find your own patterns of use as your days allow.

As for BuddyAdventure, my path is to get through the evolutions bits to new PokeDex entries first, unless really needing just a few candies for a specific purpose taking that spot as prime adventurer. Other evolutions are next in the queue though your choices may differ. Once a Pokémon has their adventure requirements for evolving, add them to your evolution queue unless you really need it now. If you have plenty of candy for this Pokémon type and don't need any adventuring for that, then switch tags so that they are now into BuddyPlay for the rest of the working them up to Best Buddy status.

Fresh caught Pokémon, different Research and even community days will inevetably alter initial plans.

I started this whole concept when my 7th buddy was getting close to Best Buddy status when I started thinking there was a better way, and started this process. I figured my best PrimeApe was a good one for the evolution and started her Buddy journey while still walking my Gyarados BestBussy 7, for the candy he could find (Special Reseach need). She was only half way to becoming a Great Buddy when a community day event allowed for a much faster meeting of criterial, catch 20 Mankeys when there were lots of them running around. So many running around that two more Annihalapes happened as well from all the catches.