A couple of weeks after releasing Leap Reader, I’ve published another free Android app.
It’s called STAD, the Irish word for “stop”.
Why another transport app?
There are already plenty of apps that do some of this, including Google Maps and the official TFI app.
But I’ve always found them frustrating in one way or another. And while Google Maps seems optimised for journey planning, I was targetting a different use case: I’m standing near a stop, or about to leave the house, and I want to know one thing — when is my bus coming?
So STAD deliberately isn’t a journey planner. What it does well is to show the stops (bus, LUAS, DART or Irish Rail) near you, and shows what’s coming next. If a bus is not at the stop yet, it shows where it is along its route, and roughly how many stops away it is, etc.
From Early Concept to Production App
I started in early August, with a working title of Bus Journeys. Within a couple of days I had a map, the national timetable loaded onto my phone, and live times for the stops around me.
I had been playing around with the idea earlier in the year, and I picked it up again in late October.
By then the app covered the Luas, DART and trains too. I realised that “Bus Journeys” made it sound like a journey planner, and for buses only. So I renamed it STAD (I was looking for something that was catchy, descriptive, but also tied into Irish public transport system names like DART and LUAS).
Solving user problems
Since AI handled a lot of the grunt work, most of my work involved working out what the available transport data really tells us, and making sure the app doesn’t claim any more than that, in order to give the user an optimal UX.
For example, take the phrase “due in 5 minutes”. Does that mean that the bus in actually tracked and will arrive in 5 minutes, or that it is timetabled to arrive (with no evidence if, in fact, it WILL arrive). I didn’t want to make statements that might confuse or disappoint users.
Showing “live” data turned out to be slippery. Some buses never report a GPS position at all. (Dublin commuters know these as “ghost buses”.) So I tried to make sure that “Live” will mean the bus is actually reporting where it is. I also try to call out situations where GPS had been available but has become lost, or where buses most likely haven’t started their journeys yet (explaining why they have no GPS position yet).
Many of my ideas didn’t survive testing. I spent a good while on a feature that paired stops on opposite sides of the road, so you’d know which side to wait on. In practice, it was just too confusing, so I took it out.
Building it with AI
As with Leap Reader and Shape, I didn’t write the code myself. I used AI coding tools, mostly Claude Code. I described what I wanted, tested each version on my Google Pixel phone, and kept asking for improvements, tweaks, edits, deletions, and new features.
AI makes it remarkably easy to add features. Knowing what features to add, how to implement them (i.e. how they should show up for users), and when to stop (stad!) is now the hard part.
Rolling it out
Google Play rejected the first version I submitted. The reviewers were testing from outside Ireland, where the TFI website blocks the timetable download, so the app got stuck on its first screen. Once I fixed that, STAD went live on 3 November.
Leveraging my Existing Google Play Developer Account
My first Android app, Happy Shapes, was a game for preschoolers that I released in 2013. I built it with Construct, a visual-led tool that let me make it without writing any code.
Ironically, back then I chose a no-code tool because I’m not a programmer. Thirteen years later, I’m still not a programmer, and I’m using what might be the ultimate no-code tools, Codex and Claude Code.
Because of my earlier Happy Shapes experiment, it meant I still had a Google Play developer account, dating back to 2013. This meant it was easier for me to get my latest apps into production, without a lot of the testing and validation etc. hurdles that new Google Play developers face if they are starting out, with new accounts. (These rules don’t apply to older accounts, created before they were introduced.)
So Happy Shapes is still helping me out, years after my first app experiment 🙂
“Software wants to be free”
Neither STAD nor Leap Reader is a commercial project. They’re things I wanted to create, and I’ve enjoyed building them. Hopefully they will be useful to others.
AI has brought the effort and cost down enough for me, or anyone else, to build these kinds of solutions, so I don’t see the point in asking anyone for money, and I doubt I would be successful anyway — that era is over.
We’ll see many more small, useful apps emerge for much the same reason (and a far greater number of less useful ones, as the barrier to entry is so low).
Anyway, STAD is available now on Google Play. It’s free, Android-only for now, and covers the whole of Ireland.
If anything looks off, or you’d like it to work differently, let me know.