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.
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)