First Bus

FIRSTBUS

About this app

Plan a journey, buy a great value mobile ticket (mTicket) or find where your bus is with live bus times – you can do all this and more with the First Bus App, making bus travel even easier.

PLAN YOUR JOURNEY
With our door to door route planner you can check your quickest route to work or plan a new adventure and help you to get around at the weekend. Just enter a destination to view your route options and we’ll show you which of our bus services can get you there with step-by-step instructions.

CHECK LIVE BUS TIMES
The First Bus App is the best way to get live bus times and route information. You can save your favourite stops, routes and locations and revisit recently searched journeys. The map shows the bus stops nearby where you can see live updates to check where and when your bus is coming letting you head to your bus stop just before your bus is due.

BUY YOUR MOBILE TICKET (MTICKET)
You can buy your great value bus ticket on the First Bus App before you travel so with mTickets there’s no need to carry cash or worry about having the right change. Some of our tickets are cheaper on the app so get it downloaded for our best bus ticket prices. Payments are secure and there’s a handy ‘buy again’ button with one-tap checkout making repeat purchases even quicker and easier to do.

The app also features:
• Tickets for Heathrow RailAir, Buses of Somerset and First Kernow.
• Payments via Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Google Pay and Apple Pay.
• The ability to gift tickets to a child or young person.

Ratings and reviews

Better than before but still unintuitive. Positives: I really like the live bus tracker icons with direction arrows and the route lines, map controls have improved. Settings are clear Improvements: it should be more like GMaps or the nat rail app. I'd like to be able to type a destination, a start point, and get the time table. When I search a bus number it seems incomplete results, and no filter option to pick one direction, and it shows just the list of stops when I want the timetable.

I've asked three different people and no one was able to help describe or show how to map a route with this app. It shows the locations of bus stops, but not how to get anywhere (as far as anyone I've encountered can tell) and doesn't show the areas (, tickets are based on areas served) clearly. However, it is easy to purchase tickets. Bad that tickets expire within 24 hours once activated, so use it or lose it (ie, don't change your mind and decide to walk because it's a nice day out)

Could be great. Useful in principle, the reality of the app is that it doesn't update frequently enough for the live bus tracking to be reliable. Once a bus is found, it can often freeze in place, or if you switch between buses, upon returning to one of never shows again unless you restart the app. And times are often at odds between bus stops and the app, which gets confusing. Or buses on the app aren't there, or buses don't appear on the app. Sooo many flaws. Which is a great shame.

What’s new

• Discover the new First Bus brand identity across the app
• Bug fixes and performance improvements