Siri requires your permission before it will allow Next3Trains to return your trains this way. This is why there is a prompt at the top of the app to ask for the user to enable Siri - iOS will then pop up a system prompt to give the app permission to be called via Siri. Once this is done, you can ask Siri for your next trains even if the app is not running (ie ask via voice when you’re in the car, pulling into the railway station parking).

Next3Trains uses the publicly available departure board data to source the data in the app. This is a free resource that has a number of limitations:

• The app only shows direct trains - ie trains that leave from the station you specify, and either stop or terminate at the station you want to get to. It doesn’t show connections - if you need to connect you can either put each of the legs you need into the app
• The app only shows departures that leave in the next 2 hours. If there aren’t any matching direct trains in the next 2 hours, the app won’t show any trains.

Widgets should show either:

• Auto-select Nearest Route enabled, and “Always” Location permission - the widget should show the route with the closest departure station. If you’ve got multiple routes with the same departure station, the first one you added should be shown
• Otherwise - the widget should show the route that you were last looking at in the app.

Note that the location aware widgets depend on the “Always” permission. iOS will at some point ask you whether you want to change to this if you use widgets because apps can’t ask for this permission by default. If you want to force this behaviour, you will needs to change the location permissions for the Next3Trains app in your iPhone settings (Settings -> Apps -> Next3Trains -> Location on iOS 18)

Widgets can’t be updated in real time by the app, so these will usually show data that is recent but not totally up to date. This is normal - to conserve battery life, iOS only allows widgets to update about 40 to 70 times a day.

If you turn on the optimise commuting hours setting and set the times you really care about up to date train times, the app will attempt to update the widget data more frequently.

Next3Trains is a hobby project, and I intend to keep this as a free app with no ads or subscriptions. As such, I don’t have the bandwidth to maintain any more than the iOS app. Sorry.

Next3Trains is a hobby project I do in my spare time. As such I’m going to try to avoid implementing too much more in the app, and concentrate on working on bug fixes and keeping up with changes in iOS (like the liquid glass changes in iOS 26). The design is also deliberately limited in what it tries to do (present the user high level details on their train status, fast) - there are a number of more fully featured apps released by both the trains companies and other developers, and this app is not intended to compete with them.

Next3Trains is a hobby project I do in my spare time. As such, while I haven’t prevented the app from running on Mac, I don’t necessarily have the bandwidth to support this across multiple platforms and sizes. Equally I don’t plan on expanding to other apple devices (eg Apple Watch) at this point.