HYPERDIA by VOICE

This app was great up until a couple weeks ago. All of the train times now list minutes for some reason. Matching up the train times made travel for me (non Japanese speaker/reader) so much easier. Please fix this the minutes don’t help anything! Edit: just noticed another issue. They removed what platforms you arrive and depart from. This is a useful piece of information for long trips. Please fix this!

It’s an ok, but not great app for train travel in Japan. Some of the app’s suggested routings can add hours to a trip (one JR rep kept asking why I was willing to add two extra hours to a trip to Aomori-Shi by following the app’s recommended itinerary). Biggest problem came at the end of the free use period. I tried to purchase an extra month using the in-app purchase mechanism. This failed, so now when I try to use the app, I get an endlessly spinning wheel that says connecting, but it never connected. Still got charged the $2.99 of course. It’s a failure.

Used this for 2 weeks during a recent trip to Japan. It was so amazingly helpful! I loved the ability to specify transportation types and companies and to sort by price/time/transfers. The only difficult part is if you don’t know the name of the station you are going to or from, it can take some guesswork.