Transport for Edinburgh 4+

The app is excellent, well designed and easy to use (hence 4 stars). HOWEVER, it is completely let down by Lothian’s bus tracking data. There appears to be two ways of tracking: GPS, which is accurate and tells you where the bus is. Timetable, which is completely inaccurate and at the whim of traffic, bus breakdowns or whatever else.

The result is seeing a bus that is allegedly a few minutes away, then due, then nonexistent. The number of times I’ve sprinted for a bus only to find the estimated time go back up to 10+ minutes... the app tells you that bus times might be estimates - why not mark them as “timetabled” and “tracked”? Then we can ignore some of them. There might be a way of seeing this already, some times are grey, some are black - in my experience this doesn’t seem to always reflect accurate times.

It works as well as the buses it tries to track, so horribly wrong. It’s extremely slow, and it spit errors constantly, “we couldn’t find this trip” and “connection error” being the most common. The apple watch app is a gimmick, never managed to make it work, not even once. This company is not good for transport and it’s definitely not good making apps. The only thing they are good for, is to raise ticket prices in the middle of a cost of living crisis to add more misery to people. They will probably paste a template response here crying about gas prices or something, but when gas prices do come down, does this company lower the ticket prices? Exactly. Also the app force closes continuously, it is really pathetic.
And I sincerely hope the “we cant find this trip” error is just due to this being a poorly made app by a developer team that doesn’t care about anything, because if its true that this company can’t find this trip, in the era of GPS, 5G and CCTV, they can’t find a whole double decker full of people, thats very scary. Its really scary for the security of employees and passengers that HQ cant find this trip.

If you’re looking for accuracy or reliability please chose another app. This app is so inaccurate, misleading and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been late because of incorrect ‘live departure’ times. So frustrating. Buses are appearing and disappearing after a couples of times having to refresh the waiting times. Then it dropped again. I see the bus colony but the app says no bus is expected. Bus 300 has been added to replace bus 35 and after weeks in operation the app does not recognise this route and buss 300 is no where to be found!!! We are talking about Edinburgh capital city’s main transport app! It’s bellow the standard of any other transport apps I have used in capitals around the world. Takes ages to load and often doesn’t recognise your location. Get it fixed! Tip for people: use google where you can see true live reflection of live departures and ALL buses included (300 route) as well! This review goes right on apple store. I doubt you’ll do anything about this but at least people can know and use other reliable alternatives!! Embarrassing!