Zoute, a transit application that combines real-time departure info and fixed route schedules, is now available for iPhone users in eight major markets across the U.S. Originally launched on Android for those in the Bay Area, the company has since expanded to New York, Boston, Chicago, L.A., D.C., Philadelphia and Portland.
The app, for those unfamiliar, comes from mobile developers Hai Le and Li Li, previously of the early location-based service Loopt, later acquired by Green Dot. They left Green Dot last year after helping build its GoBank app, in order to work on Zoute.
The team had noticed that a number of transit applications on the market today are built for a single city or single transit agency, and wanted to build an app that would provide all the info anyone without a car or taking public transit would ever need. Plus, the app aims to be more comprehensive by offering both the real-time departure info alongside the fixed schedules, he says.
Zoute competes with various transit apps and aggregators, including CityMapper, The Transit App, Moovit, Transit, and others, though some, like Embark and HopStop, have already been scooped up by Apple to help it improve its own native Maps application.
To help the company decide where to take Zoute next, they launched a “Bring Zoute to my city” feature within the app, and then responded by focusing on those areas users requested.
The app has picked up several thousand Bay Area users since its launch a few months ago, according to data provided by Google Play, but with the support for multiple cities, and critically iOS, that figure should soon grow.
The new iPhone app is a free download here.