What notifications will I get?

Justin Clarke-Salt

Next3Trains can send you push notifications when something goes wrong with a train on one of your routes. Notifications are opt-in - if you never turn them on, the app carries on working exactly as it did before and nothing about your setup leaves your phone beyond the station codes needed to fetch train times.

The three kinds of alert

You can turn each of these on or off independently in Settings:

  • Cancellations - when a train on your route is cancelled.
  • Train Delays - when a train is delayed beyond a threshold you choose. You can set this to 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 minutes; the default is 10.
  • Platform Changes - when one of your next three departures is moved to a different platform.

Platform change alerts only fire on a genuine reassignment - where a train had a platform and has been moved to another one. A platform simply being announced for the first time, or disappearing from the board, won’t trigger an alert.

When they arrive

Alerts are deliberately limited to when you’d actually care:

  • Only during the morning and evening commuting windows you’ve configured, and only on the days you’ve said you commute. Turning notifications on will also enable Commuting Hours for this reason.
  • Not when you’re travelling - if your phone is more than 100 miles from any of your saved departure stations, the app assumes you’re not doing your usual commute and stays quiet.
  • Not on Christmas Day.

You won’t be told twice about the same problem on the same train, so a train that stays delayed won’t nag you every few minutes. Platform changes are the exception - if a train is moved more than once, you’ll hear about each move.

What it deliberately doesn’t do

To be explicit - Next3Trains does not:

  • send you a reminder a set number of minutes before your train is due. There’s no “tell me 10 minutes before departure” feature.
  • push general service alerts, disruption bulletins, engineering works or strike notices. The app does show station disruption notices when you open a train’s details, but it won’t push them at you.
  • notify you about anything outside your configured routes and commuting windows.

Turning them off

Turn notifications off in Settings and the record the backend holds for your device is deleted. There’s more detail on exactly what’s stored while they’re on in the privacy policy and in Why did the privacy policy change?.