How Shoo. times its nudges

A nudge that comes too early gets swiped away. One that comes too late is worse than none. So Shoo. only has a few, and each one is tied to a specific moment in your trip rather than a round number we picked.

Here’s what they are, and what each is timed against.

Remind me to leave

When a trip you’ve planned leaves in more than five minutes, its page offers Remind me to leave. You choose 2 or 5 minutes before, and your iPhone schedules a notification for that moment. It’s a local notification, set on your phone: nothing about it goes to our server.

It tells you what to do in one sentence: walk to your stop for your service and the time it leaves, or, when the trip starts on board, which service leaves from where. If you ask with less than half a minute to spare, Shoo. says it’s already time to go and suggests tapping Go instead.

One honest limit: the reminder is set once, for the trip as it stood when you asked. If the service starts running late after that, the reminder doesn’t move. Once you tap Go, live times take over.

When to set off

A trip that starts with a walk is only as good as the walk’s timing. Every walk in Shoo. is timed, measured and drawn by Apple Maps: on the trip cards, in the trip itself, and in the order when you sort by Less walking. When a trip starts on foot, the card’s start time is when to leave: the first service’s departure, less the walk to it as Apple Maps times it.

If you walk slowly, say so once in Settings with I walk slowly, and every plan gives your walks more time. Once you’re walking with Go, Shoo. also learns your pace from the GPS, ignoring readings too slow or too fast to be walking, and uses it for the time left on your last walk to the door.

On the way to your stop, the banner counts down to the service itself: the minutes until it leaves, its platform, and the way into the station.

Before it leaves, and before your stop

During a trip, two moments get an alert, with a sound and the Dynamic Island opening up:

• Your service leaves soon: within two minutes of its departure, with the stop and platform.
• Get off at the next stop: when your stop is one away, or less than 90 seconds off, whichever comes first. At the stop itself, it becomes Get off now.

Both are worked out from live times, which the app checks every 15 seconds while a trip runs. On a long quiet stretch with your phone locked, that eases to every 45 seconds to save battery, and goes back to 15 within five minutes of the next thing you need to do, so the moments that matter are always caught at the faster pace.

What we left out

Spoken directions are switched off for now. The code is there, but the voices available didn’t sound good enough yet, so Shoo. stays quiet and lets the banner, the Lock Screen and the alerts do the work.

The banner also used to carry a pace note under the next turn. We took it out on 30 September: the countdown to your service already tells you whether you have time.