Brandon Martin-Anderson Is the New Maintainer of OneBusAway for Android
I’m delighted to announce that Brandon Martin-Anderson is the new maintainer of the OneBusAway Android app.
If you’ve updated OneBusAway on your Android phone this year, you’ve already seen Brandon’s work. Version 26 of the app was Brandon’s idea from start to finish, both the vision and the execution. Since the summer of 2025, Brandon has written more than 500 commits to the app, more than every other contributor combined over that stretch.
Version 26 is the biggest change to OneBusAway for Android in years. A few highlights:
- A new home layout. The map and your stops work together far more smoothly, with focus that moves from a stop, to a route, to a specific trip. If you prefer the old look, it’s still available as the Classic layout under Help.
- Trip planning on OpenTripPlanner 2. The app now speaks OTP 2’s GraphQL API, which brings modern trip planning to riders in Puget Sound and any other region running a current OTP server.
- Trip directions as a timeline. Directions now read like a log of your journey, with real-time corrections shown as your ride progresses.
- Smarter vehicle positions. A new extrapolation engine estimates where a bus is between real-time updates, so the vehicles on your map move plausibly instead of jumping from point to point.
Under the hood, Brandon also did the unglamorous work that keeps a nearly 20 year old codebase healthy: moving off deprecated Google location APIs, migrating time handling to java.time, expanding the test suite, and tightening up CI, making sure that the codebase will be healthy and maintainable for years to come.
Versions now follow a year-based scheme, so 26.3.3 is the third patch on the third release of 2026.
From OpenTripPlanner to OneBusAway
Brandon has been building open source transit software for a long time. Brandon was one of the creators of OpenTripPlanner, the open source multimodal trip planner that now powers journey planning for transit agencies around the world, including the trip planning features in OneBusAway’s own apps.
In Brandon’s own words:
Brandon Martin-Anderson is a Seattle-based technologist focusing on civic tech and personal fabrication. When Brandon isn’t working on OneBusAway, he’s leading the metal shop at the Seattle Makers maker space or hanging out with his chihuahua Minnow.
What This Means for You
As maintainer, Brandon sets the direction for the Android app, reviews and merges contributions, and decides what goes into each release. If you have ideas, bug reports, or code you’d like to contribute, Brandon is the person you’ll be working with.
Please join me in welcoming Brandon to the new role. The app is in very good hands.