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London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v4.0.7

Following some review feedback, I addressed some issues:

  • Major bug which was introduced from version 4.0.0 onward – if you ask for stops near me, the stops would just display in random order and it might not necessarily be the stops nearest to you. This has been fixed.
  • Styling updates to make better use of the screen space – similar to how version 3 used to look.
  • Added back the ability to search by post code which also disappeared from version 4.0.0.
  • Added links to the app stores and the website (https://www.londonbuspal.co.uk).

Platforms: Android and iOS

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London Bus Pal

Devastation of bad reviews

Reviews on the Google Play store since the release of London Bus Pal 4 has been disappointing (it has only been four days since release, but the reviews have been generally negative). At least it feels that way!

I have been moping around all day and I have lost all motivation to improve things.

Six reviews in and my average is 2.5 stars – the last six reviews of version 3.2.11 average 4.67 stars. Bad reviews really hit me hard, because I spend a lot of time thinking about my users and what they would want. I am constantly told by my advertising provider that I can make so much more money with interstitial ads, but I refuse, because I would never want to annoy a user.

As I am full-time employed, I can only work on my app in my free time. This takes quite a lot of energy at times, especially if all I want to do is take some time out. But when users are facing issues, I want to fix it for them.

There is also an unfortunate problem with the rating system. As it stands, anything which is not a 5 star rating, takes my average down. I don’t necessarily agree that every rating should be 5 stars, but I always think about what those 4 star ratings are doing to my average. That said, I am thankful for those 4 star ratings!

Because of the large number of apps on the Google Play store which are of poor quality or just plainly unusable, I feel that giving me a 1 star review is comparing me to those publishers.

How do I rate other apps?

Given that we only have 5 stars to play with, there isn’t too much scope to play with, so the difference between poor quality apps and good apps is quite small. Here is my baseline for rating apps:

  • 1 star – the app does not do what it is meant to do
  • 2 stars – the app is clearly missing much functionality or bugs / poor usability get in the way of full use
  • 3 stars – the app does most of what it is meant to do, but with some missing functionality or poor usability hindering use
  • 4 stars – the app does what it is meant to do but for whatever reason I couldn’t give it 5 stars (usually a crash or frustrating usability)
  • 5 stars – the app does exactly what I want it to do

Those are my baselines and I would then subtract stars for negative issues such as crashing, excessive battery usage, unneccessary permission requests, excessive advertising or deceptive practices.

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London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v4.0.6

Bug bash! No new features in this release, but after a couple of days of running and seeing how things work out, I made the app more stable by going through all of the logs and making sure that when the unexpected occurs, the app doesn’t blow up!

Platforms: Android and iOS

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London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v4.0.5

Bug fix: As part of the rewrite, a feature which was in the app since day was went missing and I added it back now: you can expand and collapse bus stops. This is especially useful if you have a long list of stops and you don’t want to have to scroll through the entire list.

Platforms: Android and iOS

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London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v4.0.4

This is a follow-up release on v4.0.3 with some quick bug fixes based on observed behaviour in production. Due to the iOS app still being under review, this will be released for Android only.

Platform: Android

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London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v4.0.3

Map views are back and definitely improve on the map views we have had so far. They also include route line indicators, so that you can get a better idea of where your bus will be driving.

Together with the map views, the app is also much better optimised for use with tablets.

This release also makes up the first version 4 release to Android.

Platforms: Android and iOS

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London Bus Pal

Version history

As I’ve just published a fourth major revision of my app, I thought I would relive the history of the app just to see how far it’s come:

Version 1 – the prototype

This was my first attempt at ever making an Android application. I used Google Web Toolkit which I then rendered in a web view in the application (basically GWT compiles into very optimised Javascript). Not being a fully native app wasn’t really an issue since I managed to successfully do callbacks between the app and the web view, so the app would handle things like a user pressing the back button or doing an in-app search without any hassle. Correctly handling the user pressing the back button is something which stands out for me.

This version was first published on 6 September 2013, version 1.0.1 (incorrectly numbered 1.01) followed 2 hours later and version 1.0.2 followed 2 days later.

Version 1.1.7 – the “Metropolitcan line” purple stands out.

Opening version 1 with no nearby stops (as I no longer live in London) just shows a blank screen. I see no options and I clearly deployed a version with no ads enabled!

Version 1.1.7 was the final instalment of version 1 and went live on 28 December 2013. When I now open the app, I see an error (as I am not anywhere near London), but it is quite generic and could really be anything.

Improvements I can see is a loading indicator, the search bar looks much better and a new map icon which appeared. The map views have always annoyed me as I haven’t given it too much attention. Something else which is quite obvious is that the lines are not high enough for a touch device.

Version 2 – going native

Version 2.1.3

The first release of version 2 was in October 2014. I rewrote the entire app to get rid of Google Web Toolkit and all the callbacks between basically a front-end and back-end.

Opening version 2.0.0, it looks very much like a minor change from version 1.1.7 (except I know it was a substantial change!). The one thing which is obvious is that the listview tiles have become even tighter.

Fast forwarding to version 2.1.3, the list view is still very “tight”. The changes I can see from version 2.0.0 are: I can now search for specific bus stops by name and we now have some settings. In the settings I can see that by this time I changed my implementation to allow more granular view of nearby buses (showing in 15 seconds intervals rather than seeing “due” for 90 seconds, which can feel like forever if you are waiting for a bus!).

Version 3 – material design

Version 3.2.11 – The final version of the third rewrite

Version 3.0.0 was released only a week after 2.1.3, but I had been working on it for quite some time. This version was all about material design and it was fairly cutting edge, as material design was only announced in June of the previous year. The design hasn’t changed too much since this release – apart from a styling change for dialogs. The main design has remained fairly similar since. In the back, there were a fairly large amount of moving parts, but most of this would have been invisible to users.

The next notable update was in May 2018 with GDPR coming around. With 3 days to spare, I put out the GDPR release on 22 May. This caused so many headaches that I had to try again several times to the point where I actually started over and finally released the last version on 7 June 2018.

Version 4 – Flutter and iOS

Version 4.0.0 – Not made public for Android

At work, a colleague told me about Flutter and I decided to investigate. Having looked at it, it seemed to be a really easy implementation of material design and there was the added bonus of being able to also build apps for iOS. I’ve had some requests to also make my app for iOS, but I didn’t want to end up having to maintain two code bases, the only way I would do that is if I ended up with a single code bases. I had considered many times if I should go back to my version 1 design to facilitate this. Early in November, I installed Flutter. It was a slow start, but I gained speed and confidence really quickly that I was using the right technology.

On 16 December, I published version 4.0.0 of London Bus Pal. Not as an Android app, but as an Apple app. I wanted to try the Apple deployment process and see if I missed anything major. And I was still missing map views, so I decided to soft launch on Apple and Android would follow once I had map views in place. Finally on 26 December, I launched version 4.0.3 on Android. Being another rewrite, it is quite nerve wracking, because things which were previously fixed or just stable, might not work. I have seen a few small issues, but not being used to the new error reporting software, I don’t always know if my users can see all of the errors.

What’s next?

Well, for now I’m going to focus on stabilising version 4 of London Bus Pal. The way it has been designed now, means that it should be quite easy to add new features. But I might just leave it alone, because I have a steady following of users.

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London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v4.0.2

This version increased the speed of route searching significantly as it was terribly slow previously.

Bug fixes:

  • Fixed two minor issues which could cause the app to look like it is still loading more data when it wasn’t.

Platform: iOS only

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London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v4.0.1

This update contains just a minor fix as advertisements were not displaying correctly in the previous version.

Platform: iOS only

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London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v4.0.0

This is the initial release for iOS devices only. The app has been entirely rewritten from the ground up, but don’t worry, all the features remain (except for map views which will come shortly).

The iOS version can be found here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/london-bus-pal/id1447045946