HopStop

» see hopstop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the first time i heard of hopstop was probably from a co-worker who had moved to new york around 2010. for some reason, the pitch was that the iphone google-maps app at the time had no transit layer in nyc, so you used hopstop instead. anyway, the app told you which line to take from your current corner to the address you typed in, and the walking sections at the start and end were rendered as turn-by-turn instructions you could read off the screen on the sidewalk (close enough). i never used it because i never lived in new york. for whatever reason, the closest analogue in turkey at the time was iett's own website, which was useful for bus routes in istanbul and did not really exist for ankara metro.

this part is mostly told from the us tech press, by then. chinedu echeruo had founded hopstop in 2005 out of new york, with a syracuse undergrad and an hbs mba in the bio. for some reason, the company shipped a website first, then an iphone app once the app store opened in 2008, then android a year later. anyway, the dataset was the moat. the team had hand-cleaned the schedule data for the mta and added biking and walking layers the mta did not provide itself (or roughly). by 2012 the coverage had grown to roughly six hundred cities worldwide, with strong us cities and a thinner european and asian footprint.

i was not paying attention to the company itself, but anyway. by 2013 hopstop was the default transit app for serious nyc commuters, with daily active numbers somewhere between half a million and a million depending on which leak you believed. for whatever reason, the iphone-only ios maps app from apple had launched in september 2012 with no transit at all, the famous "ios 6 maps" embarrassment of that fall. anyway, apple bought hopstop in july 2013 as part of a broader maps acquisition spree that also pulled in placebase, locationary, embark and others. the price was never disclosed and the press estimates ran from a hundred million to a billion.

september 11 2015 apple confirmed the shutdown. by then, the standalone hopstop website and ios app were turned off on october 9 2015, two weeks after ios 9 shipped with native apple maps transit. anyway, the apple maps transit launch in ios 9 covered roughly ten us cities and a handful in europe and china, which was about a sixth of what hopstop had covered standalone. honestly, the transit-coverage promise was that apple would add cities over time, and over the next several years they mostly did, but the moment of handoff was painful for anyone outside the launch cities.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the original hopstop product was a desktop website with the form-based query and a text result list. anyway, the page returned a step list with subway line numbers, transfer points, and a walk leg at each end, with a printable version for people who would not have a smartphone in hand at the corner. for some reason, the iphone app a couple years later was the part that made hopstop a household name in new york, since the dataset was clean enough that the routes actually worked and the walk legs assumed reasonable speeds (close enough). the green-circle subway-line icons on the screen were the visual hook.

the international expansion through 2010 and '11 was more uneven. by then, london and paris were strong on launch. the mta-style data partnerships were not always available outside the us, so the coverage in tokyo or beijing was incomplete in ways the marketing did not fully admit. for whatever reason, the strong us-east-coast cities were the ones that kept the user base loyal. the rest of the cities were nice-to-haves that probably brought in tourist usage but not daily commuters (or roughly).

~ how it actually ended ~

the apple acquisition in july 2013 read at the time as a maps-data-and-team deal, mostly. by then, the press correctly inferred that hopstop would not survive as a brand under apple. for some reason, the apple ios app stayed live for two more years while the team rebuilt transit inside apple maps. anyway, the september 11 2015 shutdown notice gave the user base about four weeks of warning. the cobranded landing page directed people to apple maps, the data was no longer queryable through the old api after october 9.

the hopstop shutdown was the moment the apple-maps-vs-google-maps story turned from "apple is catching up" to "apple owns the transit ui layer in nyc". by then, google maps had quietly shipped transit in nyc earlier in '15, so the actual competitive landscape was more crowded. honestly, the chinedu echeruo cash-out was significant, the post-hopstop pattern for him included philanthropic work in nigeria and the launch of constellation capital. the hopstop brand itself never reappeared inside apple, the october 9 turnoff was a clean end.

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