Geekwire: 'OneBusAway needs cash to keep popular transit app running'

GeekWire published an article about the state of financial precariousness that OneBusAway finds itself in today. I spoke to the author, Kurt Schlosser, for his story:

One of those volunteers is Aaron Brethorst, the Seattle-based director of user experience at health tech company Health Catalyst, who serves as OTSF board chair.

“Frankly, we need help across the board,” Brethorst told GeekWire. “There’s a need to be able to keep the apps running and also make sure that the feature sets that they offer remain competitive with closed source, highly funded projects like Transit app, for instance.”

Transit has raised more than $25 million to date, according to Crunchbase.

Brethorst said OneBusAway wants to add missing features on the iOS side, such as a trip planner “that people have been clamoring for for years.” On the Android side, Brethorst said that with the help of a volunteer software developer they finally just added dark mode support.

“It’s ridiculous that we’re essentially left hoping that people will grace us with a little bit of their free time to provide features and bug fixes that are critical for several hundred thousand transit riders,” he said.