Recent developments on UK Live Train Times

After a recent business review, it became clear that UK Live Trains has a promising future ahead of it.

Not much as happened with the app for a while as iOS development has moved on and the code had become outdated and difficult to change.

I’ve been spending some time moving the code to the latest Apple technologies, in particular rewriting the widget and adding some more, updating the watch app also adding live activities. In addition the whole app is now in Swift.

For a long time the fee that subscribers pay has helped me build up some quite involved infrastructure which connects to the NRE direct feed and tracks the movement of trains throughout the UK. This previously only powered the push alerts but i’ve now been able to use this in many other aspects of the app. This infrastructure powers many of the new features and means that things like the live activity can update without opening the app.

In addition many of the previous limits have changed. Subscriptions are now a simple monthly or yearly, you can add arrival times for your departure board for free and none of these new features require a subscription.

Looking forward to a bright future for the app.