Set up your commute once

Most of the trips on your phone are the same trip. Home to work and back, work to the gym on a Tuesday, school pick-up on a Thursday. Shoo. lets you save a trip like that once, then start it with one tap from the app, your Home Screen or your Lock Screen.

This guide takes about five minutes to follow, and you only do it once.

Save it once

Open Saved from the shortcuts under Where to?. Home and Work sit at the top: tap Set beside each one and add the address. Then tap New commute.

• From and To. Pick each end from Home, Work, your favourite stops and your recent places, or search for any address.
• A name, if you like. Leave it blank and it’s named after its two ends, such as Home → Work.
• An icon. A dumbbell for the gym, a mortarboard for uni, a beach umbrella for Saturdays. If you don’t choose one, it gets a tram.

Commutes are kept with your account, so they’re there when you sign in on a new iPhone. You can save as many as you repeat: the gym, school, family, the Saturday market.

Go, either way round

Your first two commutes sit under Where to?, next to Home and Work. To choose which two, open Saved, tap Edit and drag them into the order you want.

Tap a commute and a small card opens with From and To. The swap button on its edge turns it round for the trip home. It stays that way until you swap it back, and your widgets follow. Tap Go and Shoo. plans the trip and starts guiding you on the top option straight away, so there’s no list of results to read on your way out the door.

On your Home Screen and Lock Screen

Four widgets are built for the trips you repeat. Add them like any other widget: touch and hold the Home Screen or the Lock Screen, then look for Shoo.

• Smart Commute shows your commute’s next departures, with ⇄ to go the other way. It comes in small and medium, and in three Lock Screen sizes.
• My line is for two stations: the next direct services between them, with ⇄ to flip the direction.
• Shortcuts puts Home, Work and your first two commutes one tap away.
• Service status shows disruptions on the lines you use, or good service when there are none.

Widgets ask for fresh times about every 10 to 15 minutes. Late at night, when the next service is a long way off, they wait until shortly before it, so a widget nobody can use doesn’t keep asking. iOS decides the final timing and can refresh a little later than asked.

Hear about trouble on your line

Turn on Notifications in Settings and Shoo. keeps an eye on your commutes in the background. When iOS gives it a moment, it checks up to four commutes against the day’s service alerts, and tells you about a significant disruption on their lines, such as delays, cancellations or trackwork. You hear about each alert once, not every time it checks.

It reads the alerts from our server’s shared copy, so most checks don’t need to plan your trip again. A commute it hasn’t seen recently is planned once, and its lines are kept for next time.