Frustrated with Dublin's glitchy app for public transport, a guy opts to build his own

Oluwadamilola Adebayo would often notice when bus passengers opened the TFI Live app on their phones, he said, recently.

His own experience of the app hadn't been great, he said. “It’s just so slow, so buggy.”

And, travelling around Europe and using other countries’ public transport networks last year, Adebayo – an engineering graduate – began to tinker with the idea of putting together an alternative to TFI Live, he said.

As a public-transport regular, he really cares about making others' commute experience just a little bit easier, he said.

When this year rolled around, said Adebayo, his resolve for doing his bit grew stronger, he said, sitting at a city centre café.

By April, Adebayo had launched GoÉire for iPhone users. A couple of weeks ago, he rolled out a version for Android. 

It’s not the first time someone has offered an alternative to TFI Live. There's also Transit, the commercial app which covers cities around the world.

Meanwhile, on the Google Play store, TFI Live has a meagre 2.3 stars. A reviewer in July complained about “invalid request” errors, saying also that “in general the app is clunky, does not work well and feels like it was designed by a committee that hadn’t a clue”. 

Feljin Jose, a Green Party councillor, said that back when the TFI Live app first launched in 2023, he made a presentation to the National Transport Authority (NTA) – at the time, on behalf of Dublin Commuter Coalition – pitching ideas on how to upgrade it.

His slides flagged several issues, from design inconsistencies to faults with the map’s data. 

But a spokesperson for the NTA said last week that the TFI Live app has not been “functionally updated” since it first went live in April 2023. 

The NTA did spend “considerable time” talking to its developer, Naviquate – formerly Trapeze group, whose parent company is the Modaxo – “to initiate a number of functional and user interface improvements”, they said.

But its efforts have failed because of “vendor resource constraints and proposals that lacked the necessary detail to give us confidence of success”, the spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for Naviquate has not yet responded to queries sent on Thursday, including one asking about challenges it faced on deploying functional updates to the app.

But the NTA spokesperson said it is now chewing over its options.

Just getting started

Adebayo’s GoÉire uses the same open-source data first published by public-transport operators, and then republished by the NTA. It's the same live feed that scrolls across bus-stop screens, said the NTA’s spokesperson. 

But he focused on making his app work faster and minimizing glitches, Adebayo said.

GoÉire is minimalist. Users open straight onto a map, marked with their location and all of the public transport points around them. Users can toggle public transport modes on and off.

That it goes straight to the map, with what she needs in easy reach, is why Ana Iris Ramgrab likes it, she says.

She has been using GoÉire for a few days, she says, having discovered it through an invitation to test the app posted on Bluesky.

“With TFI Live I usually have to go between several screens to see how to get somewhere, and if it is in an area I'm not familiar with, it gets even harder,” she said.

The app doesn’t yet have a journey planner, a way to input a destination and see the best routes. But that's in the works, said Adebayo.

“It’s still in its early phases, it’s not a mature app yet,” he said.

But even at this early stage, around 1,000 people use it each day, Adebayo said.

He has had positive reviews on the app stores, and good feedback on Linkedin including from the NTA which wished him luck, he said  

Let me know you’re not coming

Beyond glitches and ease of use, there is another big complaint that comes up about TFI Live: that it shows buses on the way, getting nearer, about to arrive – and then, they disappear.

Adebayo, whose app also uses the same data as TFI Live, said that’s a challenge he faces too at the moment. “On that front we can’t really solve the issue of ghost buses.”

No-Show Bus Tracker

Waited for a bus in Dublin and it never showed up? We want to know.

It's true, that's not related to the app, said a spokesperson for the NTA. A “ghost bus” happens, when bus operators don’t update the system known as "Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL)" to account for a cancellation, they said. 

“Meaning that TFI Live does not receive an update that the service has been cancelled and by design displays the expected timetable arrival time for the bus,” the spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for Dublin Bus said a volley of factors play a role in why the AVL for its buses aren’t sometimes up-to-date.  

“One reason can be human input. The others are technical reasons which are being tackled through two different projects,” they said.

One is a next-generation AVL system, the spokesperson said. The other is “a project to retrofit the entire Dublin Bus fleet with new antennae which will give better accuracy in tracking buses while they are in service”, they said.