Public transit app maker HopStop, Inc. is to cease offering its services some two years after being acquired by Apple.

The app maker, rumored to have been acquired for the price of $1 billion in July 2013, provides transit and mapping services for 140 cities worldwide including New York City, Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington, D.C.

Originally founded in 2005, in a time before services such as Google Maps provided transit directions, the app became highly popular for a while, including being named in the top 100 fastest growing software companies in the United States in 2011.

Its acquisition by Apple came 12 months after Tim Cook took the helm at the company and was said to be in response to the rather poor reviews (and that’s being polite) that Apple Maps had received upon its debut in September 2012 after officially being announced at WWDC in June the same year.

It was clear from the beginning that Apple wanted what HopStop offered for its own use, with the Android version of the app being shut down once the acquisition had been finalized, although it took until 2015 for Apple to finally integrate transit directions into Apple Maps itself; the timing of the closure of HopStop after Apple Maps finally integrated the app into its core offering is most definitely not coincidental.

Great app

Those who uses HopStop raved about it, and in many ways it was years before its time in terms of what it was able to deliver when it came to providing transit data, particularly when in the early years some transport providers were even reticent to share their data, going as far as claiming copyright over it.

How many users it still had in 2015 no one quite knows, but given the emergence of an excellent alternative in Google Maps, and now Apple Maps also offering the same service, it would be a fair guess to suggest that users numbers had declined far from their peak.

There’s no official statement from either Apple or HopStop about the closure other than a notice on the HopStop webpage stating that it would be closing in October, with no specific date provided.

Image credit: mr_t_in_dc/Flickr/CC by 2.0