What to expect from Android’s upcoming Transit mode for your daily commute

Our devices are pretty smart about figuring out what we’re up to, whether that’s our smartwatch detecting when we’re on a bike ride, or our phone recognizing when we’re driving a car. Late last year, we caught wind of another new tool Google appeared to be developing along these lines, identifying early work on a new system for figuring out when you’re riding public transit. As we wait for Google to finish up and introduce it, we’ve got some new updates on what users can expect.

Let’s start with the name. Last time around, we thought this might debut as “Transiting,” but let’s be honest — that sounded pretty wonky. Here, we’re now seeing it as the much more sensibly named “Transit mode.”

Most of what we have to share today involves new text strings that are appearing in recent Android builds. Even without being able to actually use Transit mode just yet, these offer our best insight into how this will operate and what functionality to expect:

We start off there with a high-level overview of what Transit mode will offer, bringing you updates about your commute on your lock and home screens. There’s clearly going to be some form of an onboarding process — what can we expect from that? Are you going to have to be very explicit about your transit requirements? The good news there: It looks like Google plans to figure much of this out for itself.

Users will have the option to keep their Timeline on, making sure Transit mode has a full sense of their travel history, and we explicitly see here that Google intends to learn our travel habits over time.

We also found a couple animations that users should see as they complete the Transit mode setup process:

Here’s one for setting up your home and work addresses.

And this one may be a general completion marker for Transit mode setup.

While most of this makes enough sense, and we can follow along with much of what Google appears to be preparing, there are also some bits that have us scratching our head a little:

Last time, we saw that Transit mode would help users “enjoy a better transit ride with automatic settings adjustments” — but what exactly will those settings be, and how will Transit mode change them? If you were hoping Google would discourage playing loud media in public, you’re in luck:

Transit mode wants to be as Bluetooth-friendly as possible, and can make sure your phone is ready to connect to your headphones the moment you pull them out of your bag. We expect to see silent, sound-on, and vibrate-only options here.

How are you going to interact with Transit mode? At least one option should be going through your Quick Settings tiles:

While we’ve been hopeful that our devices might use sensor information to automatically detect when we’re on public transit, the evidence we’re looking at today paints the picture of a more manual system. Still, we’re not privy to the full picture just yet, so it’s entirely possible that functionality could end up broader than just these initial strings reveal.

Right now, we’d just love the chance to see Transit mode operational, and really learn the ins and outs of everything it can do. It’s a little difficult to say when we might have that chance, but we’ll continue to keep an eye out for any further progress.