v0.7.0 — you can tell how old a bus position is

A bus position ten minutes out of date used to look exactly like a live one.

What you'll notice

Buses fade as their positions age. Full colour for the first two minutes, then a gradual fade that bottoms out at ten minutes. A washed-out bus is one whose position is old — it never disappears, so you can still tap it.

The direction arrow goes away after three minutes. That's the honest part. A three-minute-old bearing on a city route is often simply wrong, because the bus has turned since. Better no arrow than one pointing the wrong way.

Tap a bus and the panel tells you the age. 3 min late · updated 5 min ago. When the position is more than two minutes old the lateness loses its amber or green and goes grey — that figure is worked out from the position, so it's exactly as old as the position is. A green "on time" is a claim about now, and grey says plainly that it isn't.

Where the thresholds come from

Measured, not guessed: 1,827 buses sampled across Cambridge, London, Manchester and Glasgow, each aged against the server's own clock.

Around Cambridge, Stagecoach East is about three quarters of the buses on screen and reports a median of 46 seconds old, so the two-minute mark sits clear of a healthy feed — you shouldn't see fading on a normal Stagecoach bus.

Whippet is different. Its feed runs about five and a half minutes behind, so its buses — the U, the St Ives and Huntingdon routes — will sit permanently faded with no arrow. That's not a bug in the app. Those positions really are that old, and the panel will tell you so.

Elsewhere in the country feeds are slower, so the app warns more often. The numbers suit Cambridge on purpose.

It also keeps counting when the app can't reach the network

If your signal drops, the buses already on screen stay put — but they now keep ageing and fading on their own. Previously they'd have sat frozen at full colour while you looked at a picture that was getting older by the minute.

Installing

Download bustimes-0.7.0.apk and open it on your phone. It installs over v0.6.0 without losing anything — same signing key, higher version code, and both were checked against each other before this was published.

Android 8.0 (API 26) or later.

sha256  c4080724875315902c54c2e1cb7e00d7408fcb7f800b4709d575351fc2dd5fde

Small print

The fade is deliberately gentle in its first minutes, so the arrow disappearing is the thing you'll actually spot. Nothing is sent anywhere, and the age is worked out against the server's clock rather than your phone's, so a phone with the wrong time doesn't invent staleness.

Data

Everything comes from bustimes.org. Unofficial and not affiliated with it. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, tiles by OpenFreeMap.