Using your mobile to pay for public transport
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Here in the Netherlands, public transport uses a chip card common to pretty much all the different transport companies throughout the country. Perhaps naturally, the company behind the card also wanted to allow travellers to use their mobile phones to pay instead of having to get a chip card, which requires filling out a form on a web site, uploading a photo of yourself, paying €7.50, doing that again every five years, etc. It’d be much easier to be able to download an app to a phone and register it. Right?
Today, my newspaper told me that the trial with just such an app, that began last year, has been halted because it’s clearly failed. The trial was supposed to have 10,000 participants, but in the end only 8,000 people actually used it. Getting the whole thing to work seems to have been the biggest problem: this article claims that helpdesks usually had to walk new users through the installation step by step, since it involved not only installing the relevant app, but also creating a digital wallet somewhere and transferring one cent to the chip card company to activate everything. Apparently, nine different systems needed to work “seamlessly” to have this succeed.
The other main problem quoted is more perplexing to me:
Een ander probleem was dat er zoveel verschillende smartphones zijn.
“Another problem was that there are so many different smartphones.” Well duh, it’s not like nobody knew that before deciding to make this app. But they’re making it out to be like it needs to support different phone models individually when all you really need is one version for Android and one for iOS and you’ve got the vast majority of users covered, I’d think. And there wasn’t even an iOS version at all, it seems, so they probably only have one to support.
On the positive side, the article claims that people who got it working, liked the convenience. So I guess they got at least something right. I’m guessing that’ll be the part that gets thrown by the wayside for attempt No. 2 — should that ever materialize. (Given other big IT projects in this country, I have my doubts.)
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@gurth said in Using your mobile to pay for public transport:
But they’re making it out to be like it needs to support different phone models individually when all you really need is one version for Android and one for iOS and you’ve got the vast majority of users covered, I’d think.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha, ha ha!
That's what you might guess, but you would be totally wrong. Android on each model of phone is different from the next, whether that is because manufacturers and telecoms don't release updates for "old" models, or because they customize the OS.
I love my Android phone, but damn is it hard to keep track of things like where to find a setting when someone asks for help. And as a programmer who rarely writes Android apps, it seems to take a lot of extra care to write an app that runs on older and newer OSes. I spend most of my time reading the documentation and figuring out what works on older and newer OS versions, compared to the small amount of time needed to actually write the code.
I don't envy anyone who writes Android apps for a living.
