Navitime train transit app includes the most free features

Some time ago, I said that I'd do an updated comparison of the free Japanese train apps. Here it is. I limited this comparison to what I consider to be fully-featured apps. This basically rules out anything that is just a browser frontend or English-only, leaving Ekitan, Jorudan, Navitime, and Google Maps.

Unfortunately, the premium apps are all subscription based and cost several bucks a month, and each app publisher works hard to try and get you to pay money. For example, Jorudan uses most of its pixels to display buttons for features that are disabled without a subscription, which is annoying.

Speaking of annoyances, none of these are perfect. Jorudan displays timetables from the top of the hour, rather than from the next departure. Ekitan forces you to mash the back button to return to the start screen after a search because it lacks a "home" button. Navitime search for Tokyo matches every station in Tokyo that has a duplicate name in some other part of the country (because "tokyo" is appended in parenthesis to the station name for resolving ambiguities). When pulling up a train schedule in Google maps, if you don't hit the back button twice to drop back to the main screen, next time you open the app, you'll be greeted by the same timetable.

(Click the image to the left to enlarge (or open it in a new tab) and behold navitime's search results for 東京.)

A few of the cool features each has: Jorudan has unlimited history. Navitime has an alarm for making transfers. Ekitan allows shake to clear fields.

I tried to think of a subjective way to rank these apps, so I scored them based on their inclusion of features. Excellent implementation (◎) get 3 points. functional implementation (◯) gets 2, half-arsed (△) 1. Zero points for non implementation. Navitime has the most features for free.

	Score	Romaji input	Schedule	Sharing	Bookmarks	History	Prioritize (price etc)	Select from map	Set walking speed	Transfer alarm	Departure alarm	Next/previous departure
Navitime 3.2.3	23	✕	◎	◯	△	◎	◎	◯	◎	◎	✕	◎
Ekitan 2.2.5	20	◎	◎	◎	✕	◎	◯	✕	◎	✕	◎	✕
Google Maps 7.3.0	12	◎	◎	✕	✕	◯	△	◎	✕	✕	✕	✕
Jorudan 1.6.5	9	◎	◯	✕	✕	◎	✕	△	✕	✕	✕	✕