ThamesLink Railway 4+

This is a welcome update as the app was so old, buggy & clunky. 1 missing feature from the old app that I used every day though was clicking on a common journey & then being able to go “earlier” in time. This allowed me to review the train I have already boarded to see its arrival time & current delay. It is still possible to find this information via planning a new journey but it takes longer. If it’s possible to add that feature back to common journeys that would be exceptionally useful.

The app desperately needed an update to make it use the full screen on modern phones, stop crashes etc. but what they’ve done is make the bit that shows your journeys very ‘click heavy’. No more at a glance seeing the next few journeys for your commute. Instead you have to click to switch the journey back to the direction you are going (as it’ll be the wrong way from your last commute), click to see more, squint at the details in a tiny font (having the accessibility feature of large fonts on completely breaks it) next to icons that give minor details that you really don’t care on. Completely inaccessible. Update on more use: when you click to see details of a journey quite often you’re taken to a different train because the positions haven’t updated. And instead of showing you train times you’re might be forced to click off for with a full screen pop up advert. Finally the journey planner away from commutes has just become a buy ticket gateway, which is useless when you have a ticket and want to see the *journeys* you can make. One positive: they seem to have at least updated to allow you to see earlier trains for info on the train you are on.

The old app finally gets a makeover but in some places it has gone backwards. The dashboard is probably better, and the quick switch of start and end points work well. The important news being below the train times is a bad news, last week it hid the news that all trains were cancelled after a point in time until after I had bought my ticket…. Buying a ticket is also a bit harder and the favourites also a bit harder to repurchase. Keep iterating, hopefully it will keep improving.