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Comment by solutionyogi | Hacker News Reader

I love Citimapper! I live in NYC and it's the only app I use for navigation now. Highlights for me:

1. Get me Home/Get Me To Work quick links. It takes your current location as starting point and tells you your options for going home/work.

2. You can configure it to monitor your subway line during commute time (7AM to 10AM and 4pm to 6pm) and it will notify you if the subway is delayed for any reason. I use line 6 which breaks down more often than I want and thanks to the App, I can take N/Q/R if Line 6 is down.

3. The way 'Get Me Somewhere' works. In addition to being able to type an address, you can move the map around to point the destination pin to a particular point in map. It's hard for me to explain but it works amazingly well especially in NYC where people often go by cross streets and don't have the actual street address.

I completely agree with author that Citiymapper has an exceptional UI/UX.

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Your #3 is funny, since that's precisely the one thing that stops me from being able to use Citymapper on a daily basis. The way I use Google Maps in NYC is by typing in, say, "23rd and 3rd", and Google figures out what I mean. Because Citymapper is dependent on Foursquare for reverse geocoding, I can't really do that; it either has to be enter an exact address or moving the map around.

Really funny—I was considering using that as one of the other scenarios in the post. Citymapper actually does it as well, but is more reliable on named streets (e.g. "Mercer and Broome"). What Google Maps does well is realizing that 13th and 2nd can't mean 13th avenue (since that doesn't exist) so it will show directions to 13th street and 2nd avenue.

Is their MTA data more reliable than Google's? Terribly often, and especially on week-ends, Google Maps will tell me a subway is coming even when the line is closed, rerouted, etc. I understand taking all temporary changes into account is a hard problem, yet I can't help finding it ironic that in the city which hosts their second largest engineering center, Google can't get that right.

Can't speak for MTA but in London the Citymapper service updates are pretty great. It tells you what's closed, notes disruptions when showing trip suggestions, and you can preview upcoming weekend's disruptions. About the only problem is it shows the disruption icon on trips that use the non-disrupted part of a line.

1. native behaviour in Google Now 2. native behaviour in Google Now 3. native behaviour in Google Now

None of these requires additional configuration, it just does it all automagically.

Nobody knows what Google Now is. It's hidden away in the Google Search app in iOS (who uses the Google Search app? Nobody I know. You search in a browser.), accessible only if you happen to know to swipe up from the bottom of the screen. Because that's a really obvious place for a mapping app to be.

I'd at least like to pretend that I'm not giving Google any more data.

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