Transperth 4+

This app is great for someone who is new to the city and this app would help them around the city. It would be a really good for that. I use trans perth bus and train for daily commute. Trains are great, don’t need this app for that. I use this app to get to to my bus stop just in time to catch the next bus. What is missing in the app for a daily commuter like me is - when the next bus is expected to arrive at my bus stop based on real-time data. The buses plying my routes are always late and they arrived in batches, so some real-time feedback means I don’t have to spend 30 mins at the busy stop(with no shelter) waiting for my next bus. If what I asked is too hard, next bust thing would be - when I search for a route, highlight the bus which is closest to me based on my gps coordinates. When I search for routes currently, the order is based on scheduled times. This morning when searching for my bus route, the closest bus to me was on the 4th row and I had to mess around for 5 minutes to identify that. I am a developer myself and I can deduce from the app the type of real-time data at your disposal. What I am asking appears to me very much doable, especially my second request. I would love to hear back from Transperth with their feedback on my request.

I was in the app beta and was impressed with how responsive the devs were to limitations in the usage of the app and how to easily access information. All seemed well! But now the app has come out, it’s apparent that a user-friendly interface is just lipstick on a pig of worthless information. Several times now I have waited patiently at a bus stop for a bus that did not arrive when it’s “live tracking” declared it would. And each time, after the scheduled time the “live” designation was turned off and the app declared the bus to have gone past. Essentially, if the bus doesn’t make the timetable, it claims it has no idea where it is and gives you no further info. This is no more useful than the previous apps which just mutely gave the timetable and had nfi where a bus actually was. Why on earth is this happening? Is the “live” tracking a farce, and there is no actual geolocation or manual tracking taking place? Is there actual live tracking, but it’s being turned off when the bus is behind schedule? I can’t decide which of those is worse! But either way the presentation of this apps function is entirely dishonest, and seems to have benefitted only the developers bank accounts.

The train times are marked as ‘live’ in app but are really just animating the positions between the scheduled times. Today the trains were announced to be delayed by 5 minutes at the station but the app displayed it as being on time and even stopping at and passing the station I was at while I was waiting.

I’ve also had many issues with the app crashing on launch. Requiring me to delete and reinstall the app to get it working again. I would recommend that the developers go through their crash logs!

The live bus times however is super handy. Although the UI could do with a bit of work as launching the ‘live view’ is not particularly intuitive. As well as the button itself having a very small tap area.