Three apps can still mean one underlying answer.
I was heading to the ExCeL the morning after a tube strike, when the tubes were meant to be running again, and I had a session I wanted to catch. The boards outside the station said the trains were running soon, so I waited, switching between Citymapper and Google Maps to work out which one to believe. A woman walking past told me not to bother. She’d been standing at another station where the boards said the same thing and nothing had come, so she’d given up and was getting the bus. I ended up on a bus that didn’t go all the way, then the Elizabeth line, and the whole thing took far longer than I’d planned for a journey that was meant to be simple.
When the feed stops being useful, the fallback is still the street.
By the June strike a few months later I’d added TfL Go to the other two, because TfL’s own site pointed at it as the best way to get around during disruption. It gave me “every 15 minutes due to strikes,” which was about as useful as the boards, and nothing the other two apps weren’t already showing me.
The apps all read from the same TfL feed. On a normal day that feed is good and the apps compete on how they present it, which is why I keep them on my phone. On a strike day the feed drops back to planned frequencies because there’s no reliable real-time signal to report, and switching between the apps was me hoping one of them had a better feed than the others, when the TfL data is the primary source and everything downstream inherits whatever it’s doing. There was no better answer to find in a third app.
I was working through something with an AI recently where it made up a name for a team lead as I hadn’t given it one, and rather than ask, it decided on Daniel and carried on as if Daniel had been there all along. It offered him to me with the same confidence as everything it had got right, no flag, no question, and the only reason I caught it was that I knew there was no Daniel. A steady “5 mins” looks identical whether there’s a train behind it or not, and an invented colleague reads identically to a real one if you don’t already hold the fact that he doesn’t exist.
I used to just stand at the bus stop as a kid and wait, before any of this existed, with no number to look at and nothing to switch to. I knew I was guessing. Now there’s a number on a board, three apps reading the same feed, and an AI that will invent a person rather than admit it doesn’t know, and the guessing hasn’t changed, only how certain everything looks while I do it. The thing worth knowing isn’t which app to trust, it’s what each one is actually reading and whether the source behind it is having a good day.