//Find out what’s going on underground
There are a lot of apps springing up on the Android Market to provide real-time information on the running of city metros and other travel services. TubeStatus for Londoners is a fairly simple example and it’s free, although competition Tube London only costs £0.99.
The main feature of TubeStatus is that it links into the official London Underground website and pulls down the status information on the running of the various underground lines. These are organised in tabs labelled ‘Now’, ‘Later today’ and ‘This weekend’ (operating in portrait screen mode only).
Each of these tabs consist of a list of the 11 London underground lines – displayed in their correct colour – and with their status listed alongside – good service, delays, planned closure etc. You can tap anything that’s not ‘good service’ to get more details about what’s gone wrong.
It’s an elegant solution, although somewhat loose in terms of what ‘Later today’ actually means; presumably it’s just a way of flagging up scheduled engineering work.
Hitting the Menu button brings up the option of a scrollable Tube Map, which is a useful feature, and one that was added to the app’s most recent version. Indeed, developer Maxence Warzecha is constantly developing TubeStatus. The original version didn’t have the ‘Later today’ tab for example, and a future release will add in the status of the Docklands Light Railway.
Whether Warzecha has any plans to add a journey planner – the main additional feature provided by Tube London – isn’t clear. It would be a considerable piece of work no doubt, but one that would be very useful for visitors to London. For regular travellers on the London underground however, being able to manually reroute themselves around any delays or closures is their most important need, and TubeStatus certainly fulfills this.
//TubeStatus for Londoners is a simple and clean app that provides real-time information on the running (or otherwise) of the London underground
App: TubeStatus for Londoners (Android)
Developer: Maxence Warzecha
Price: free
Version reviewed: 1.2
Requires: internet access
Size: 1.15MB
Score: 3/5
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