Transit Now
Transit Now 3 min read

15 years of Transit Now

From texting the TTC in 2011 to a countdown on your watch face. What's changed, and what hasn't.

From the maker of Transit Now & Cycle NowIndie developer, downtown Toronto

In 2011 I was a student, riding the TTC to school every day. I spent a lot of that time standing at stops in the cold, wondering if the bus was coming or if I should just walk.

So I made an app for it. That was fifteen years ago.

It started with a text message

The first Transit Now didn't use mobile data at all. Back then, few people had smartphones, and mobile data plans weren't common yet. But the TTC had a text-message service: send a stop number, get the next arrival times back.

Transit Now Toronto, as it was called, sent those texts for you and showed the answer on screen. It ran on Android 1.6. It was one of the first apps for the TTC.

Fifteen years, the short version

  1. 2011Transit Now Toronto launches, for the TTC, over text message.
  2. 2012Real-time arrivals over mobile data. MobileSyrup writes that it makes it easier to catch that elusive streetcar.
  3. 2013A big redesign, alarms, and the voice countdown that's still in the app today. BlogTO puts it in its top 5 TTC apps for Android.
  4. 2014The Toronto Star includes it in its guide to Toronto's best transit apps.
  5. 2015The first watch app, for Android Wear. And the start of a rebuild from scratch.
  6. 2016Transit Now Toronto becomes just Transit Now, with more cities, including Boston and the East Bay.
  7. 2017Cycle Now arrives, for bike share.
  8. 2025A brand-new iPhone app.
  9. 2026A new watch app, countdowns to the second on iPhone, quiet bike routes and turn-by-turn in Cycle Now. And this blog.

The night the arrivals stopped

Not every year was smooth. In June 2024, the TTC arrival feed Transit Now relied on stopped, and arrival times disappeared from the app.

I worked through the night and got arrivals back from another source. Today, Transit Now combines more than one source, so if one goes quiet, the others keep your arrivals coming.

What hasn't changed

Almost everything about the app has been rebuilt at least once. The phones changed. The TTC's data changed. The watch went from Android Wear to Wear OS. There's an iPhone app again.

The job hasn't changed at all: tell you when your bus is coming. Fast, accurate, and without making you dig for it.

And it's still an indie app, made in Toronto.

Thank you

Today, thousands of people open Transit Now every day. Some of you have been riding with it for years. One of you wrote this on Google Play in January:

“8 years later after my original review, and still nothing beats this app.”

Thank you for riding with it, for the reviews, and for every email telling me a stop was wrong or a feature was missing.

Here's to the next fifteen. If there's something you'd like Transit Now to do next, tell me: support@transitnowapp.com.