Vonatinfó

User experience could be a lot better. [Update and reduction in rating] Today I purchased a ticket before getting on the train. The payment was accepted and the ticket was downloaded into the app. Between the time I bought the ticket and the time I needed to present the ticket to the conductor, about an hour, the app shut down by itself. When I tried to open the app on the train, it stalled because I was in a dead zone, no data service available. I was unable to present my ticket, and had to ask the conductor to give me more time to get it working. The app finally opened, but then stalled again trying to open my already purchased ticket. It seems this app cannot work offline, even if it already has a valid ticket stored. This is just nuts, as my commuter train (S71) goes through a couple of lengthy dead zones, and the Wi-Fi on these trains hasn't worked in many months. One could easily believe this app was designed by some bureaucrat from the former Soviet Union. There are just so many things wrong with it. Even before this, on another occasion last week, the app stalled while trying to download the ticket, and could not recover. I had to close the app and restart. The ticket I had already purchased never downloaded, but the fare was paid. I had to buy another ticket.

The app is a bit tedious to use (about a million clicks to buy a ticket to my usual trip) but works in overall. It's stable, works with OTP Simple and they even added a 'flashlight' function when ticket controllers complained about difficulties with ticket scanning. Seems like a good product manager and good(ish) engineers are behind the app with a terrible product designer.

The app is pretty tedious to use, you can look at the BudapestGO app to see how a better (still not great) app would function. There is so many back-and-forth going on when trying to find things in the app but the worst thing by far is that logins are only valid for 24 hours. What kind of dumb limitation that is? It's made even worse with the login page not supporting password managers so you need to either copy or manually enter your credentials every time. Please at least fix one of these!