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tMinus

tMinus

Star the stops you use, and tMinus tells you when to leave

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Android

About

An open-source MBTA companion for Android. Star the stops you use and they become live departure boards on Home, home-screen widgets, and notifications that tell you when to leave for a commute, when the last train goes, and when an elevator at your station is out. No account, no onboarding, and it works without an API key. Built with Jetpack Compose and Glance against the public MBTA V3 API; the source is on GitHub for anyone who wants to build on or learn from it.

  • Home shows live departure boards for your starred stops — route colour, headsign, minutes, and clock time
  • Four Glance widgets: next trip, favorite stops, station board, and service alerts
  • Commute alerts that count down live in the notification, with snooze and mute-for-today
  • Last-train and first-train alerts, with windows that cross midnight
  • Station accessibility alerts — elevator and escalator outages at the stops you watch
  • Track numbers on commuter rail departures, on widgets and boards alike
  • Material You dynamic colour on Android 12+, with an opt-out
  • Open source — inspect, fork, and contribute on GitHub

Tech Stack

KotlinJetpack ComposeGlanceWorkManagerMBTA V3 API

Category

Transit / Open source

Year

2026

Screenshots

tMinus screenshot 1tMinus screenshot 2tMinus screenshot 3tMinus screenshot 4tMinus screenshot 5tMinus screenshot 6tMinus screenshot 7tMinus screenshot 8

Changelog

2026-08-20
  • Commute alerts count down live in the notification, and carry Snooze 5 min and Mute today
  • Fixed commutes with a lead time of ~10 minutes or more never alerting at all on frequent routes like the Red Line
  • The commute editor's sample trip now previews the same train the alert will name
  • Home departures show the whole headsign, including the part saying which stops a train skips
2026-08-17
  • Notifications are drawn by the platform instead of a custom layout — dark mode, Material You, and font settings are respected, and long alert text expands
  • Station alerts lead with what has actually failed, e.g. "Elevator out at Chinatown"
  • Fixed elevator and escalator alerts never notifying — the MBTA alerts endpoint was filtering them out before the app saw them
  • Widgets no longer stay on "Tap to set up" after being configured, and preview their real content in the widget picker
  • Track numbers now appear on the trip widget and the boards, not just the station board
  • Home leads with the next departures from starred stations, and stop search ranks exact matches first
  • Material You dynamic colour on Android 12+, with an opt-out in Settings
  • Targets Android 16 (API 36)
2026-04-14
  • Public launch — open source MBTA companion app (widgets, notifications, alerts)