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.
I agree color can have powerful meaning and help relate the app to the real world. My point was more the use of color in the app seems dated. There's many ways they could make the app feel more modern while retaining color as a way finding method.
E.g. the green floating search box. What does making this green help with? Again, these are opinions, but it looks a little jenky to me.
In the case I mentioned, it makes sense because the CTA train lines are quite literally designated by colors (The blue line runs from O'Hare International into downtown, red line from Evanston to south of the city etc), therefore opening the app and seeing a rainbow of colors represents the colored transit modes. So in that context it makes sense, that may have been less than clear in my first comment here.
To me it feels like material design 1.0 - when every Android app had a bunch of bright colors in rectangle shapes.
This is more a styling thing (similar to fashion) but apps have shifted away from this heavy color to more grey, white or dark theme with color used less as more of an accent or to highlight certain features / parts of the UI.
I think Transit app could benefit from going with a more plain color for backgrounds and use their bright colors more sparingly. IMO, less can be more. The whole row of a bus line doesn't need to be red or blue to get the point across for me.
The whole row of a bus line doesn't need to be red or blue to get the point across for me.
For numbered buses I think this makes sense and is already the case, in my example, the Chicago Transit rail line, the different rails aren't numbered, they are literally designated by color-as in going to the blue line all of the signage is blue indicating which line station you're at (NYC for example has numbered transit lines for their trains). Said a better way: in some cities certain transit modes don't have names or numbers, but are literally designated by color. We don't have a 6 train, we have a Blue line. The app is consistent with this-and for me that makes perfect sense.
That's why I think-in this instance, and in many others where various public transit modes are designated by color (I think the MTA in Atlanta does?)-it makes perfect sense. It isn't that the Transit App is arbitrarily assigning colors, the colors are assigned to represent how the Chicago Transit Authority _themselves_ have designated each disparate rail line by color.
In other cases, everything else has the same color. Bus line 80, 72, 76 are all just a standard blue color.
Don’t judge it while sitting on your butt with enough time to type out multiple paragraphs about how it could be more restrained. Judge it when you are leaving the office a little late and want to know if you can catch your bus if you hustle right now.
Big blocks of color are great. Big blocks of color are easy to read in a half a second while you’re walking through the crowds on the sidewalk.
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
I tried both for a while. I liked The Citymaper UI better, but Transit actually shows the live position of the bus. Transit wins. This is with VTA in Santa Clara, California.
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.