## Overview

The JMU Bus App started as a personal project during Matt's freshman year at James Madison University. What began as a simple tool for personal use quickly evolved into an indispensable application used daily by over 20,000 students. Despite multiple official solutions provided by the city, the JMU Bus App remained the preferred choice among students for many years until the official app finally caught up with real-time tracking capabilities.

The app's success was driven by its comprehensive feature set and reliability. Students could track buses in real-time through an innovative crowd-sourcing system, access holiday routes, receive automatic schedule updates, and utilize advanced features like custom route finding and favorite bus tracking. The app was featured in the school newspaper, _The Breeze_, and was regularly mentioned both in Student Shoutouts and in-person between students. The Bus App continued to serve the JMU community for 12 years before being discontinued.

### Route Rules + Announcements

During inclement weather, end of semester changes, or holidays, some routes would have a delayed start, an early closure, or wouldn't run at all. A custom built Route Rules feature would allow Matt to adjust routes on the fly which would be automatically synced to everyone elses' devices. Further, global messages and route-specific messages could be shown to inform users of the schedule changes.

### Crowd-sourced Bus Tagging

The JMU Bus App pioneered a crowd-sourced Bus Tagging system, so that students could publish when and where they saw the bus in order to better predict where they were. The bus tagging system was able to adjust the published schedules on-the-fly by their reported delay or early arrival, leading to more accurate schedules and predictions of arrival. The Bus Tagging system would allow users to broadcast where the buses were in real-time, so that students could better plan for when to head to the bus stop.

### Route Finding, Generic Locations, and GPS

New college students have a lot to learn their first few weeks and months - not only how to balance their social life and their studies, but also how to navigate the city and campus. To aid in this, the Bus App added a powerful Route Finder, Generic Locations, and used GPS to help you figure out where you are and what buses are nearby.

Generic Locations combined tedious and convoluted locations into student-friendly names. For example, if a student was at The Quad and was trying to get to E-Hall, they could simply run a search for those two locations.

### Developed over 12 years

With such a long product lifespan, the JMU Bus App went through multiple major redesigns for both Android and iOS. The Bus App followed multiple design language trends through the years to stay up to date with the current trends and expected UI/UX paradigms.

## Tech

- Native Android (Java)
- Native iOS (Objective-C)
- NodeJS
- TypeScript
- Express.js
- Firebase Database
- REST
- AWS S3
- PHP

> \[Matt\] has done all the app development independently and I am very impressed with his programming and interface design skills. **The app will become indispensable.**

Dr. Anthony Teate,

Professor, Integrated Science and Technology,

James Madison University

Years Active: 12

Lifetime Users: 20k+

Native Apps: 2

Daily Active Users: 4.5k+