How do commuting hours work?

Turning on Optimize for Commuting Hours in Settings gives you a morning window, an evening window, and the days of the week you commute. Several parts of the app use them, and a couple of details are easy to trip over.

What the windows control

• Widget updates. iOS gives widgets a fixed daily budget of refreshes; the app prioritises spending it inside your windows rather than spreading it over the whole day. See Why aren’t my widgets updating?.
• Notifications. Cancellation, delay and platform change alerts are only sent inside your windows, on your commuting days. See What notifications will I get?.
• Live Activities. One starts automatically during a window for the route you’re nearest to. See How do Live Activities work?.
• The watch and widgets’ “day off” state. Outside your commuting days they show a view denoting that it isn’t a commuting day (with a bed icon) rather than a departure board.

The windows do not change which route the widget shows - that’s decided by location or by the route you last looked at. See Why is my widget showing the wrong station?.

The times are UK railway time

Your windows are always in UK time, because the railway is. If you take your phone abroad, the times you see in Settings don’t shift with the local time zone, and neither do your notifications. (Before version 1.10.1 opening Settings while abroad could quietly move both windows by the time difference - if your times look wrong after a trip, update the app and check them again.)

Windows can cross midnight

A window that ends before it starts - say 23:00 to 04:30 - is treated as an overnight window, and Settings shows a “next day” caption under the end time to confirm it. The part after midnight counts as belonging to the day the window started, so a Friday-night shift still gets its alerts at 01:00 on Saturday even if Saturday isn’t a commuting day.

Because the pickers never used to stop you setting the times the wrong way round, a very long overnight window - anything over 12 hours - is assumed to be a mistake and is corrected automatically by swapping the two times. 11:30 to 08:30 becomes 08:30 to 11:30.

Overlapping windows

If your morning and evening windows overlap, both sets of routes are watched during the overlap, which is fine. Settings will only stop you making a change that creates an overlap, so you can always edit your way out of one.

Defaults and special days

If you don’t change anything, the morning window starts at 06:30 and ends at 08:30, and the evening window starts at 16:30 and ends at 18:30. There are no alerts on Christmas Day as there are no trains running, and the widgets show a special Christmas view (with a gift icon) instead.

• Faq