The Transit App Trying to Beat Google and Apple at Mobile Mapping

Over more than a decade, Google has hired thousands of developers and spent billions of dollars to essentially set the standard for navigation apps. Its biggest rival, Apple Maps, has also come a long way from the embarrassing glitches of its early days. Together, they dominate the mobile mapping market.

But their maps aren’t perfect, which leaves room for competitors to fill in the various gaps. One such competitor is the small team behind a popular public-transit app called, a bit dryly, Transit App. In their bid to create a fully functional map that would include every transit mode in a city without sacrificing aesthetics, the Montreal-based company of just 17* developers, designers, and cartographers are taking the two tech giants head on. “Google Maps and Apple Maps have tried to do it, but we thought we could do better,” they wrote last week on Medium.