National Rail 4+

Considering the size of national rail and the amount of people that are forced to use it terrible service under the banner of national rail, the application in simple terms is unfit for purpose. Booking a ticket online is simply near impossible. Payment details, entered more than 4 times to no avail, journey planning logistically navigating the terrible layout will require you having a PhD in poor applications, think you can keep a journey within the planner whilst also wanting to see live times, think again, it’s like you have taken an already terrible service of national rail and then made it worse on purpose to annoy people who are simply trying to catch a train. Often I go to the journey planner to find that it’s placed me a day into the future for no actual reason. I then open the date box for the application to magically reload me the correct date, so in simple terms unless you tell the application today’s date you will be planning time scales of the next day by default. Why on earth would you set it for the next day as a default option. It literally makes no sense. I honestly cannot convey how bad this application is, nothing is good about it at all, I wish I didn’t have to use this app but sadly I do and it destroys me everyday.

I've used this app for ages and it used to be one of the most useful I had but it's become too unreliable in recent versions. Frequently says not connected to the Internet even when it is and everything else is working fine - usually happens when you are in a rush to catch a train and trying to get information in a rush, which is the point of having the app on the go. Giving platform information was one its most useful features but a few weeks ago the platform info started to be incorrect and now it just isn't giving it anymore. Really annoying - if you have to go look at the departure boards anyway to find the platform, you might as well not bother with the app. Plus I travel through Waterloo, Victoria and Clapham Junction all the time, all really big stations with around 20 platforms so knowing which platform to aim for in advance can make a big difference in which side of the station to approach from / which tube exit to take etc. Occasionally it does some kind of data update and wipes all your favourite stations and seems to make saving regular journeys overcomplicated. A real shame - I used to use this daily but have pretty much given up after such poor functionality lately.

I've used this app loads and never had any big problems (dodgy connectivity I could deal with). However today when I had to take a different route than normal, I found that in "plan your route", although it showed every possible train route from 5am in the morning (completely unnecessary), as well as all the routes for up to seven hours later, it didn't show the one that I'd looked up the evening previously and had planned to take. "Oh well" I thought, "I must have got it wrong". I looked up the next one and waited, now certain to arrive late for a meeting. Nearer the time I went back to look again, just to check the time of the connection, and found that DETAILS OF THE JOURNEY I WAS ABOUT TO TAKE HAD COMPLETELY DISAPPEARED FROM THE LISTING. That's right, folks, I was probably right in the first place and therefore unnecessarily late, it's just that in its wisdom this app had thrown a rod and decided not to show details of the next train out. By the way "live trains" has never worked for me - I get "no routes available" every time. Now I can't trust this app any more and I'm back to using the web-based site instead where this doesn't happen. What a useless pile of crap this app is.