RomeoCharlie71
Established Member
Yes I’m led to believe E15 will be Edinburgh to Oban and E17 will be a new route on the east coast ran from Aberdeen and Perth
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Ember: Electric coach service
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paravostok
Member
Does Ember not text you anymore if they're experiencing any issues?
There is the service updates page too:
It did indeed and there is no easy link to it on the home page. The only way to get updates is to look at the live map or book a bus not user friendly at all
Yes, I'm really not sure why they removed the link to it from the home page. I only found it by Googling for service updates.
The website works pretty well but surely it's about time they release an app?
For a startup like ember, not having an app is absolutely criminal and definitely limits their business and potential clientele! Just my two cents.
Yes 100% agree, I've seen people wanting to buy tickets and they instantly open Google Play Store and search ember and get zero results.
The ideas were there but just far too slow in implementing them. With the amount of tech staff and management they have in place being more than the likes of Citylink you would think things would be more pro active but it feels like they are only in the job for the pay check. Infact I met one manager who I recon would struggle to point out an ember coach to anyone!
computerSaysNo
Established Member
- Joined
- 14 Dec 2018
- Messages
- 1,667
They have one well-designed responsive website which works on all devices capable of accessing the internet. For an app they may need to make a version for Android and a version for Apple, and then test those on a wide variety of devices which is much more time consuming than just having the website.
They are in competition with Flixbus, Stagecoach, Citylink and ScotRail. They all have apps.
They don't have to develop it themselves, there are plenty of operators using apps developed by transport software specialists sharing the same basic design (but with unique branding obviously).
Indeed, even Google results for coach travel in Scotland doesn't bring up ember!
As for the app, it doesn't need to be any more than a simple app displaying the website. They have a fully developed app for staff which is hopeless!
They may have done research into the numbers of their users who actually look on Google Play when they want to buy tickets, and how many of them actually give up when they can't find an app, rather than just going to the website.
If you want an off-the-shelf app to handle ticketing then you're going to have to operate an off-the-shelf back-end. If you do an app with no ticketing just so you can appear in the app store, is more likely to leave people disappointed and not bothering to find the website than anything else.
I've never needed the Flixbus app, since they have a good website, but I suspect they will have spent quite a lot of money on a custom app which they use all over Europe. Scotrail may well have a generic app made by their ticket operator. I dread to think what the Citylink app is like given how bad the Stagecoach one is.
Highland050261
Member
There was one in an early build process, but I’m not sure what happened to it.
paravostok
Member
Yes you can do the same on Android and I had the ember website as an app on my phone and it worked well that way
Ember now have a fleet of around 100 vehicles costing in the region of £50m so it seems strange to me that they have not invested a tiny fraction of that in an app.
The website is fine with the Live Map reasonably slick and accurate. However other than that there is very little useable content. You can't download timetables and there is no direct link to the service updates.
The off-the-shelf app I'm alluding to is the one created by Passenger. It's used by McGill's, Go-Ahead, Blackpool Transport, Reading Buses etc and works very well. I'm sure Ember would be able to hook into it but perhaps there is a "not invented here" attitude.
I like Ember and use them regularly so there's no I'll will from my me.
GusB
Established Member
Would you mind explaining your figures?
The cost of vehicles isn't the only business expense.
markymark2000
On Moderation
Passenger websites/apps don't have features available for this type of service. Hence Xplore Dundee and Oxford Airline have to pay out for a separate system for passengers wanting to book trips on their coach services.
Transmach and Rise Digital Media both offer app/website packages for this style of work but I know that in both cases the booking engines aren't the best and the tracking on both platforms is dire (Irish Citylink use Rise Digital Media and I am certain that Wexford Bus' site is done by Transmach if you are looking for examples). Ember would probably be better creating their own app and improving their own website over using these separate systems.
What is there to explain?
I'm simply mentioning the size of the fleet and the theoretical cost of the vehicles if they were bought outright. It's a significant undertaking/investment however it is financed and I'm fully aware there are a variety of ongoing business expenses.
My perfectly straightforward point is that Ember are now a significant and highly visible coach operator that doesn't have an app, unlike all their competitors, and a website with no timetables on it.
Apps on your phone aren't actually necessary, unless the company needs your phone to run some kind of function, the mania for apps 15 years ago was "we gotta have an app" but actually, a normal browser is capable of doing almost all those functions. Originally an app needed your location data, but now you can just log onto the website and do everything there.
If you want a button on your phone's home screen, having a "create shortcut" button would work just as well.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
And quite a lot of apps are just an embedded web browser anyway. However it is something people expect them to have.
Quite a lot of people are stupid.
Me included, if there was a button on the website that added it to the phone home screen for easy access i'd just use that instead instead of a Store. Id even call it "download app" to make it simple for people to know what it is.
Unfortunately the browsers don't allow you to add a button to your website which does that.
Chrome on Android does pop up a banner suggesting you do it for any website which is installable (including ember). Unfortunately the timing is controlled by Chrome, and it suggests as soon as you land on the page, before you've have had a chance to even look at the website, and then not again for a long time.
If you want to do it later then there is an "Add to Start Screen" option on the browser menu on Chrome for Android, and "Add to Home Screen" option the share menu on Safari for iOS. If you're a regular user of Ember then that might be really useful to you.
FWIW I suspect it would probably be worthwhile for Ember to add an app to the app store for marketing reasons. It's likely that the upshot of them doing that is that app users would have a much worse experience than the they do on the web, and probably that web users would have a worse experience because the budget and staff would be spread more thinly. There are very few features you need in a travel app which an app can do and a website can't.
paravostok
Member
For what it's worth, Citylink's app is so bad I refuse to use it, slow and buggy and I find it drains battery really quickly with their tracking not being straightforward, and the same with Flix's app, no way to track a coach without putting in a stop and seeing where it is relative to the stop, I find it easier to just use the Ember site than either of those apps, though I have downloaded the website as a sort of pseudo app through chrome.
