OneBusAway 4+

The app said the bus was 3 stops away when it was at my stop. My location services were on. The entire ride to work, the app was inaccurate by multiple stops. This is nice for a general idea, but it's tracking algorithm is clearly not accurate when it comes to how long busses take to get from one stop to the next/can't account for when busses don't stop.

Fairly disappointing considering the app boasts real time tracking, which I took to mean their is a gps in the bus tracking it. This is not real time tracking. It's "within 5 minutes tracking". Not good enough for commuting to work and minimizing time at a bus stop.

This app does sensible, useful things, and has a vastly better interface the other transit apps I've seen. It has a developer that apparently cares about making it better, which is practically unheard of. It even has good iPad functionality, and takes advantage of the larger format! I'm from San Diego; when I visited LA recently, I sorely missed this app. Trust me, the alternatives are all much worse. Sure, it's sometimes a little off on the timing estimates between stops. It doesn't handle layovers well, assuming the bus will leave early because it's present before the time it's scheduled to leave. And when a bus stops at the same stop when going in two different directions, I wish it would separate them out into different listings. But if you want to find, with reasonable accuracy, when a bus will be somewhere, and even filter by routes or bookmark frequently used stops, this is a solid and functional app, and if your local transit company makes use of it, believe me, it's way better than anything they would've come out with themselves. I use it often and am frequently pleased at how not-impossible it is to use, which is high praise for an app of this nature. I rarely encounter bugs, and updates actually bring useful improvements. It's a rare thing: a free app I'd actually be willing to pay for.

The new UI gives a lot less information than the old one.

*Buses arriving at a stop take up more space on the screen, so you have to scroll to see more than a couple minutes at busier stops.

*App no longer displays a lot of useful information, such as how long ago a bus checked in at the location it is showing. A bus four stops away two minutes ago is very different than a bus four stops away right now. It also doesn’t show the maps for through routes. My bus turns into a different route a couple stops from my house, and I used to be able to scroll down to that link (“continues as…”) to see the map, but the maps are no longer available. Now I have to back out to the home page and search for the route to bring it up.

*Data doesn’t reliably refresh. In the old UI, the data for what buses are arriving at a stop, where a bus is on its route, etc, would automatically refresh so if you looked at it after a couple of minutes, it would pull a new location or new predicted times. On the new version, you have to manually refresh on those pages that even have a refresh option. On a lot of pages, you have to exit out of the page and reenter it in order to get new data.