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London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v20.7.3

Several changes in this release: β€’

  • Updated the home screen so buttons fit better on the screen 🏠
  • Moved the bus to show “additional bus info” to be a floating button ℹ️
  • You now have the ability to send suggestions for updates to bus data πŸ“
  • Ads should no longer interfere with the menu πŸ“΅
  • Fixed a bug where an error would appear if you go into the “remove ads” screen multiple times πŸ›
  • Fixed a bug where you could not view the details of buses which are not in service β›”
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London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v20.7.2

  • You can now back up your favourites and other settings to the cloud and restore it on another device (requires sign in through the settings menu) πŸ’Ύ (this is not yet automated!)
  • Fixed an issue where you could only pay me once to remove ads (you should now be able to do this multiple times) πŸ’°
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London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v20.7.1

  • Fixed an issue where the time would not show fully on all devices if using the “Toggle countdown” functionality ⏰
  • Updated the journey planner to use a more modern map style πŸ—ΊοΈ
  • For speed and efficiency, made the download file even smaller πŸ—œοΈ
  • Fixed a small typo in the GDPR consent screen (it was showing \n instead of starting a new paragraph) πŸ“‘
  • Removed support for Android 4 🍫

I have made the decision to remove support for Android 4 altogether. I used to keep a really old version of the app around (from 2018) for older versions of Android, but it has become nearly impossible to support, even in the new app framework. It is not easy to find test devices and many users would give bad ratings for the app when it was unfortunately the really old software causing the issues, rather than my app.

Categories
London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v20.6.1

Some small updates:

  • Added in a section for bus routes which start with the letter ‘P’ 🚌
  • Speed and efficiency improvements to give you the best experience possible ⏰
Categories
Development London Bus Pal

What’s been happening?

I haven’t written any posts for a while, but you will notice that there have been some updates to the app. Life started getting really busy from October, but things seem to have stabilised a bit now so that I can try and find a balance between life and my app.

My posts are mainly to try and give people a bit of an insight into what goes on behind the scenes of London Bus Pal. Here’s what you need to know:

  • I have a day job which is not developing a mobile app
  • I work on London Bus Pal in the evenings, mornings before work and weekends (but I have taken long breaks at times when I just get too busy at work)
  • I do not make enough money from the app to not have to work a day job
  • If I could, I would work on the app full-time, because I have so many ideas but just not enough time to implement them

That’s all for now. Always happy to correspond over email!

Categories
London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v20.2.2

  • Updated the way the app displays errors when TfL has scheduled maintenance 😑
  • Improved the look of the toggle countdown time displays ⏰
  • Added in some “secret” swipe gestures – you can swipe left or right to get additional information:
    • Swipe the stop name left or right when viewing stops to see the 5 digit stop code. 🚏
    • Swipe the destination of a bus to see the bus registration number 🚌
  • Better handling when the app loses connectivity to the internet 🌐
  • A few small bug fixes 🐞

Categories
London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v20.2.1

Next update to make things better.

  • β€’ Added in toggle function to switch between countdown and ETA view ⏰
  • Added in option to show fleet number by default when looking at buses (changed in settings) 🚌
  • Improvements to make the app as small as possible πŸ—œοΈ
  • Updates to the platform and libraries I use to ensure that the app is as stable as possible. πŸ“š
Categories
London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v20.1.1

First update of 2020 – it’s just a small one to make sure everything stays up to date.

Please be sure to review this app if you find it useful – reviews are really helpful for a small, independent developer like myself.

β€’ Updates to the platform and libraries I use to ensure that the app is as stable as possible. πŸ“š

Tip: you can go to settings and choose whether to show the home screen, nearby stops or your favourite stops when the application starts. It’s right at the top! 🏠

Categories
London Bus Pal

It broke and I am not fixing it

Version 19.9.2 of London Bus Pal “Pro” version seems to have broken it and a user had to point this out to me after it had been live for a few days. I checked it and it is definitely broken. The app breaks completely upon start-up, so it is incredible that this got missed – if I had a team working on this, they would have had really stern words from me – this is just unacceptable.

But even by my own fairly high standards, this happened. And poor quality control is only half the story here. Back in January of this year, I mentioned the issue of having a free and paid app (https://www.londonbuspal.co.uk/blog/ideas-on-monetisation/) and that I wanted to kill off the paid app. The only action I really took since then, was to unpublish the app. I wasn’t sure that this was possible, but I could publish updates, but stop selling the application. In a perfect world, I would have loved to have kept the paid app going for another year or two.

The two versions of the app are exactly the same, except that the one shows ads and the other one sometimes shows ads (if you paid a tip, the “free” app won’t show ads either). From a technical stand-point, the apps are the same, I therefore only really thoroughly test either the paid-for or free version. Until fairly recently, it used to be the paid-for app, since it was easy to do and I didn’t have to deal with the ads during testing. A change in the way I did this changed it and the default version I now test is the free version. The latest release went out and I never really checked the paid-for version – I haven’t had issues specific to only one version forever, so not sure why this is any different.

Either way, once the code is written, I actually have to do four builds (free version for iOS, free version for Google stores, free version for non-Google stores and paid version for Google stores). As three of the four builds and the vast majority of users use the free version, it makes sense that I should be testing that version.

Whilst I cannot be sure as I haven’t investigated, the issue could very well just be that the build broke the app, rather than code. The fact of the matter here is that I just don’t have time to check right now! I am working remotely on a tablet and even if I can investigate and find the fix, it will likely be another 36 hours at the very least before I can think of publishing the fix. In all honestly, I would love to just go and revert to a working version, but this also takes effort and time I just don’t have available right now.

Due to this excessive overhead to keep a version of the app going which is used by less than 2% of my users (even though ever user is equally important to me), it just makes sense to finally drop it. The ability to remove ads is available in the free version, so no functionality is lost and at least I know that everyone is using the version I actually tested.

Please don’t believe by any means that dropping support for the paid version is at all a sign for the rest of the app. Dropping support really means I can do a much better job of keeping the free app going.

Categories
London Bus Pal

London Bus Pal v19.9.2

  • Improvement: you can now choose whether the application is permanently in dark mode, light mode or if it should use the system settings. πŸŒ™
  • Updates to the platform and libraries I use to ensure that the app is as stable as possible (I know this sounds lame, but it’s important!). πŸ“š

Tip: you can go to settings and choose whether to show the home screen, nearby stops or your favourite stops when the application starts. It’s right at the top! 🏠

This is a relatively light update as I updated the Flutter framework to the latest version – 1.9.1. This should generally improve the way things work on the latest versions of iOS and Android.

At the time of writing, it’s not clear if this will be published on iOS or not. My previous two attempts were rejected by Apple as the app was getting stuck on the splash screen in their test environments on iPads. When searching for this, it appears that it’s not an uncommon issue and not only related to Flutter. I do wonder if it is not an issue in their test lab as the app seemed perfectly fine on an iPad I used to test it with. It will take a day or two before I will know if this update will go out.