Discovered this app quite by accident a number of years ago, and after eyeing its competition, settled on this one to recommend to people.
It did exactly one thing well that I wanted: it looked at my current location and gave me ETAs for all of the nearby lines, MUNI, BART, whatever it was I might need. At the time I was mulling my own ideas about an app, more or less like this, but it dropped from my considerations once I discovered this app.
It's been a more consistent companion than my choice of web browsers, mail clients, search engines, note apps, operating systems or whatever, and I've pretty much never felt any need to actually replace it.
Some apps just do one thing and do it very well. Kudos to Transit app.
Functionally, the redesign is pretty badass. The gesture navigation is intuitive and well executed. They've placed the live bus locations in a more prominent position which is awesome.
Visually, I feel like the app is still in 2015. Lots of clashing colors, super heavy shadow and the new green search bar feels slapped on. These are opinions though :) .
The clashing colors help out a lot more than you may think. I can easily filter out, in a city like Chicago exactly what I need filtered out. Walking to the L on Diversey? I only care about the red line, despite being in range of a brown, pink and purple line. I scroll til I see red, bam. 10 minutes. I got time to slide into 7/11 for a soda pop.
Or oh hey light blue. There's a Divvy station nearby. I think I'll bike today.
I love the color presentation of Transit App, personally for this very reason.
Doesn't mention Transit's widget which is its greatest feature. I love that I can get bus/train arrival times without opening an app. It automatically populates with the nearest bus lines and you can tap it to switch directions.
I used to love this app, but lately (~1 year) it's been buggy and not refreshing the bus schedule (SF) properly and giving me garbage info – which is worse than no info at all.
They seem to have a stale data problem; in an effort to never show you an empty app, they fallback to the transit schedule or whatever they last pulled from the server while they seem to be waiting for the refreshed data to download.
If your cellular connection is bad (or the tower is congested), you can be looking at a quite old transfer time without any visual indication of that fact. If you were offline, the app would tell you it was falling back to a schedule. If the request actually timed out and failed it would do the same. But because the request is stuck in dropped-packet-limbo, it isn't obvious.
Sometimes I tap into the map and back out to get it to re-send the request. Then the transfer times will all jump and update to reasonable values.
(This is just behavior I'm deducing from using the app and watching it say the next N is 2 minutes, then after waiting 30-40 seconds it jumps to 15 minutes. Clearly they were showing me stale data at the time)
I saw this post on the bus, installed the app. Checked what it says for my transfer. I had about 8 minutes.
Google said my bus comes at 7:29. Transit app says it comes at 7:37. The bus came at 7:29. The app didn't match the posted time table either.
This is in a major tech area next to a major university. Their About screen lists dozens of local transit authorities as data sources, with the one running the bus in question as a licensed source.
Love the usability / intuitiveness of this app. My only qualm is that the drag down to go back isn't _always_ available.. for example, if I select a "Ford GoBike" location, I have to tap the "X" in the top right to go back, which is a bit of a reach on an iPhone. But that's pretty minor complaint.
A double tap on the home button will push the screen halfway down, allowing easy one-handed access to top buttons with your thumb. That gesture has been in iOS for years.
I much prefer Citymapper. It's less buggy (I lose the current directions at least once per direction with Transit...) and much faster (searches, times). It also displays where you should be in the train so you can get out faster. But in the city I currently live, only Transit exists
[+] [-] SllX|7 years ago|reply
It did exactly one thing well that I wanted: it looked at my current location and gave me ETAs for all of the nearby lines, MUNI, BART, whatever it was I might need. At the time I was mulling my own ideas about an app, more or less like this, but it dropped from my considerations once I discovered this app.
It's been a more consistent companion than my choice of web browsers, mail clients, search engines, note apps, operating systems or whatever, and I've pretty much never felt any need to actually replace it.
Some apps just do one thing and do it very well. Kudos to Transit app.
[+] [-] stephencoyner|7 years ago|reply
Visually, I feel like the app is still in 2015. Lots of clashing colors, super heavy shadow and the new green search bar feels slapped on. These are opinions though :) .
Hats off to the team.
[+] [-] dvtrn|7 years ago|reply
Or oh hey light blue. There's a Divvy station nearby. I think I'll bike today.
I love the color presentation of Transit App, personally for this very reason.
[+] [-] Svexar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iampims|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenadu02|7 years ago|reply
If your cellular connection is bad (or the tower is congested), you can be looking at a quite old transfer time without any visual indication of that fact. If you were offline, the app would tell you it was falling back to a schedule. If the request actually timed out and failed it would do the same. But because the request is stuck in dropped-packet-limbo, it isn't obvious.
Sometimes I tap into the map and back out to get it to re-send the request. Then the transfer times will all jump and update to reasonable values.
(This is just behavior I'm deducing from using the app and watching it say the next N is 2 minutes, then after waiting 30-40 seconds it jumps to 15 minutes. Clearly they were showing me stale data at the time)
[+] [-] enos|7 years ago|reply
I saw this post on the bus, installed the app. Checked what it says for my transfer. I had about 8 minutes.
Google said my bus comes at 7:29. Transit app says it comes at 7:37. The bus came at 7:29. The app didn't match the posted time table either.
This is in a major tech area next to a major university. Their About screen lists dozens of local transit authorities as data sources, with the one running the bus in question as a licensed source.
App deleted.
[+] [-] dsr_|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcMgD2BwE72F|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ant6n|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatswrong0|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donarb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] genmon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hadrien01|7 years ago|reply