Jakdojade: public transport

Review by eFreeware

Jakdojade is the official Android app of the Polish journey-planning service jakdojade.pl, published by CITY-NAV sp. z o.o. It has been on Google Play since August 2011 and has passed ten million installs, which tells you something about how central it is to getting around Polish cities. The pitch is simple: work out how to get somewhere by bus, tram, metro or train, and buy the ticket for it in the same place.

That combination is the main reason to consider it. Plenty of apps will show you a timetable, and plenty of transit operators sell their own tickets, but having route search, stop maps and ticket purchase in one place saves a step on every journey. The app is free to download, carries advertising, and offers in-app purchases, so the entry cost is nothing beyond your patience with the ads.

The average rating sits at 3.7 from more than 160,000 ratings, which is respectable without being stellar for an app this widely installed. I read that as a sign of an app people rely on daily and complain about when a city's data lags or a ticket purchase misbehaves, rather than one that delights. If you live in one of the covered cities and use public transport regularly, it is the obvious starting point.

Route search across city lines and intercity rail

The core of the app is a connection search that spans both urban networks and long-distance rail. On the city side it draws on the timetables of operators such as ZTM, MPK, MZK, SKM and PKP, so a single query can mix a tram leg with a suburban train. For longer trips it plans intercity train connections across carriers including PKP Intercity, POLREGIO, Koleje Mazowieckie, Koleje Dolnośląskie, Łódzka Kolej Aglomeracyjna and Koleje Małopolskie.

The developer calls it the most accurate and popular search engine for public transport connections, which is a marketing claim rather than something I can verify from a description. The scope is unusually broad for a single app: regional railways, trolleybuses and metro sit alongside ordinary bus and tram routes, and the maps cover stops, connections and lines rather than just a list of departures.

For anyone planning a trip that starts on a city tram and ends on an intercity train, that breadth matters more than any single feature. You are not stitching two apps together or re-entering your origin and destination at the station. The trade-off is that the quality of any given result depends on the operator data behind it, and with dozens of cities in the list, consistency across all of them is a lot to ask.

Real-time tracking, tickets and offline timetables

Beyond planning, the app shows where vehicles actually are. In selected cities it plots buses and trams on a map with their current position, the delay they are running, and the expected time they will reach your stop. That is the feature that turns a timetable from a plan into something you can act on when you are deciding whether to leave the house now or finish your coffee.

Ticket purchase is built in, though only in certain cities, and the list is shorter than the timetable coverage. It includes Kraków, Kielce, Leszno, Lublin, Łódź, Pabianice, Poznań, Swarzędz, Tychy, Warszawa, Wrocław, Zgierz and Zielona Góra, plus the Metropolia GZM group of Bytom, Chorzów, Gliwice, Katowice, Mysłowice, Sosnowiec, Tarnowskie Góry and Zabrze, and the Trójmiasto cities of Gdańsk, Gdynia, Sopot and Wejherowo. If your city appears on the timetable list, this app suits you for planning the trip, with payment handled separately.

There is also a useful offline element: timetables for stops you have saved remain available without a connection. That covers the situation where you are underground or out of data and still want to know when the next service runs. It applies to saved stops rather than to live tracking, which by its nature needs a network.

What the Premium tier adds

The app is free with advertising, and a Premium version is offered through in-app purchase. Premium removes the ads and adds a set of features that the free tier does not include: full GPS navigation for public transport with a transfer alert that warns you when your stop is coming up, departures from the nearest bus stop, and desktop widgets.

The navigation and transfer alert are the parts that would push me toward paying. Following a route with several changes in an unfamiliar city is exactly where a plain list of legs becomes stressful, and an alert before each transfer is a genuinely useful safety net. Widgets and nearest-stop departures are conveniences for people who check the same stop every morning.

Because the app carries ads and sells an upgrade, it is worth deciding early whether you want those extras. I would treat the free version as a full trip planner and ticket machine, and Premium as the layer that makes following a route hands-free.

Coverage is the deciding factor

The app is built for public transport in Polish cities, and its usefulness rises and falls with how well your particular city is served. Timetables are listed for a long roster that includes Warszawa, Kraków, Łódź, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk, Gdynia, Sopot, Katowice, Szczecin, Lublin, Bydgoszcz, Toruń, Rzeszów, Olsztyn, Opole and many smaller towns such as Gniezno, Konin, Leszno, Pabianice, Swarzędz and Zgierz.

Real-time vehicle positions and ticket sales are narrower, each available only in selected cities. That means two people in two different Polish cities can have quite different experiences of the same app: one buys a ticket and watches the tram approach, the other plans the route and pays at a machine. Neither is a fault, but it is the first thing to check before you commit.

If you travel in Poland and use buses, trams, metro or regional rail, the app is aimed at you. If your journeys are mostly outside the country or by car, the coverage list will tell you quickly whether there is anything here for you.

Getting the most from it day to day

The most obvious habit to build is saving the stops you use often, since saved timetables are the part that keeps working without a connection. Commuters with a fixed stop and a fixed morning window get the most from that, and it also means the app is useful on a platform with poor signal.

For unfamiliar journeys, the combination of route search and real-time positions is where the app stands out. Checking the vehicle's current delay before you set off is more informative than trusting the printed timetable, and it is the sort of thing that changes how early you leave. In cities where tickets are sold in the app, buying at the same moment removes the need to find a machine or a kiosk.

If you make multi-leg trips regularly, the Premium navigation and transfer alert are the features I would weigh. They address the part of public transport that is hardest to get right, which is knowing when to get off and where to change. The app has been updated recently, with the focus on smoothing out the traveling experience rather than on new headline features.

A planner worth having for Polish city travel

Jakdojade does one job well and does it in one place: it tells you how to get somewhere by public transport in Poland, and in many cities it lets you buy the ticket without leaving the app. The intercity rail planning, the maps and the real-time vehicle tracking give it more range than a single-city operator app, and the offline timetables for saved stops are a small but genuinely useful touch.

The caveats are the ones the app itself sets out. It is free with ads and a paid Premium tier, ticket buying and live tracking are limited to selected cities, and the 3.7 average from over 160,000 ratings suggests a tool people depend on rather than one they love. None of that undermines the core function.

I would suggest it to anyone living in or regularly visiting a Polish city covered by the timetable list, especially if their city also supports ticket purchase or real-time tracking. Travelers passing through Poland with a rail leg and a city leg to connect will find the intercity planning useful too. If your city is not on the list, the app has little to offer you, and the list is easy enough to check before installing.

What's new in version 7.3.4

We make every effort to make traveling around the city with the Jakdojade app even more comfortable and hassle-free. This is why we are constantly trying to improve our application. Do you use Jakdojade? Please rate the app. Your opinion is important to us.