The Official MTA App

I don’t know what compelled the MTA to release this update, but whoever was responsible for this should be fired immediately. This update is horrendous and should never have seen the light of day. If the goal was to disrupt, anger, and inconvenience the thousands of New Yorkers who relied on this app for travel, then congratulations because you’ve succeeded in doing just that. This is only time I can think of in recent memory where an update has less practical functionality than the previous version. Opening the app to a tab of all my favorited train stations and bus stops? Gone. An easily navigable and simple user interface? Gone. The only two things I appreciate in this update is the swap direction button for the subways and the layout of the subway tab in the status page, but at the expense of everything else that made this app great to use, I’d rather have the old version back. This is what happens when you design apps for the approval of your corporate stakeholders instead of the people who use the app everyday. Do better next time. Edit: The times for the trains and buses aren’t even accurate anymore. I nearly missed my train multiple times because the app would say 5 minutes but the train was already approaching the station. Luckily I was close enough I could run. You should be ashamed of yourselves for releasing something so terrible.

Why would you completely change the app? I used to be able to open the app, click on the subway line I needed, scroll down and see when the train was coming. Now there are so many added steps. I have to keep switching to my favorites tab instead of my favorite lines just being there when I open the app, click past a service change alert page and change the direction I need to see EVERYtime. Then I have to push the stop times up to fill the screen because for some reason they added a huge unnecessary map on the subway page. Also the train times are gone. It used to say the scheduled time a train was coming as well as how many minutes away it was. Now it just says how many minutes. We have limited time when trying to catch a train. I just need to open it, make 1 or 2 clicks and see when the train is coming. I used to be able to do that. This new app takes too much to navigate. The whole user interface is just unnecessarily clunky and not user friendly. Simple is always better. I never used the bus part of the app for this same reason and always chose to use the web browser. Now you’ve ruined the subway part. The only positive is that it now supports dark mode. I wish I’d never updated. Please change it back.

The layout of this new app is far busier and requires more taps to get the same information as the old app/web platform. For a tourist not in a hurry, that information can be useful, but for a native NYer who needs to get someplace now, fumbling through an app to find the same information can mean missing a train, bus, or transfer. However, the worst part is that estimated arrival times are more often than not, completely wrong. Trains and buses in the app that don’t exist, arrival times being 3-5 minutes off, and travel times between stops completely incorrect (too long or too short). Cross checking with the train arrival signs in stations or at bus stops and checking the web app show me that this app is the issue and somehow is working off different algorithms or data sets to estimate timing. The web app has become quite good and overwhelmingly is the most reliable for arrival times. I’ve resorted to using the web app, because while not perfect, it’s by comparison 5 stars over this. I look forward to some fast updates to fix, at the very least, the missing and incorrect arrival times.