How to use Commute Guardian

For closed testers. Last updated 2 September 2026.

Commute Guardian names every station in your earphones and wakes you before your stop. You start it, put the phone away, and stop looking out of the window. This page is everything you need, in the order you will meet it.

The whole thing in five lines

You tell it where you are going. It works out the rest.
Put the phone in your pocket or bag. You never have to look at it.
It says each station out loud as you pass it.
About two stations before yours it wakes you, and keeps getting louder until you answer.
It needs no internet during the ride, and your location never leaves your phone.

Set it up once

Ten minutes, at home, on wifi. Not on the platform.

1. Install it

I send you two links by mail. Open both on the phone, signed in with the same Google account you gave me.

The first one adds you to the test. Press Become a tester.
The second one is the Play Store page. Install from there.

If Play says the app was not found, wait a few minutes after joining and reload. If I sent you an APK file to install by hand at any point, uninstall that one first, and know that the journeys saved in it go with it.

2. Answer the questions it asks on first open

What it asks for	Why it matters to you
Location, all the time	This is the whole app. Without it nothing is announced and nothing wakes you. Android asks a second time on its own screen. Choose `Allow all the time`. It is easy to miss.
Notifications	The ride controls live in your notification shade, so you can end a journey without unlocking the phone.
Battery, on some phones	Xiaomi, Redmi, realme, oppo, vivo and a few others put background apps to sleep. If yours is one of them the app shows the exact steps for your brand. Please do them, or a ride can die quietly in your pocket.

3. Two things about your earphones

The voice and the alarm go to your earphones first. With no earphones connected, everything plays out loud on the phone speaker instead.

Your media volume must not be at zero. The alarm rides on it.
If your earphones run out of battery mid-journey, the sound moves to the speaker. Worth knowing before you rely on it.

Your first ride

Start it on the platform, or as you sit down. Everything after step 5 happens without you.

Press New journey. The home screen has one main button.
Type where you are going. The box says Where to?. Type a few letters and pick your station. You do not tell it where you are now. It finds that itself.
Let it find you. It needs a few seconds to get a GPS fix and work out which way you are going. Under a station roof this can be slow, so it offers Set my station if you would rather just tell it.
Read the short list, then press Start the ride. Before starting it names anything that could stop it waking you: earphones not connected, or the volume too low.
Wait three seconds. It says your route out loud and shows Cancel, so a wrong tap costs nothing. Ignore it and the ride begins.
Put the phone away and lock it. This is the point. You do not need to keep the app open, and you do not need to keep checking.

What you will hear

Every announcement is in English for now.

As you reach a station
Now approaching Dombivli.

Once you are past it
You have passed Dombivli.

If your route needs a train change
Your train change at Dadar is next.

If naming every station is too much, there is a switch in Settings. Turned off, it announces only your own stop and any train change.

When it wakes you

This is the part the whole app exists for, so it is deliberately hard to sleep through. About two stations before yours, it speaks first, politely.

The check in
Your stop, Kalyan, is next. Tap your earphones, or press the I am awake button, to show you are awake.

If you do not answer, it becomes an alarm that gets louder every fifteen seconds, and vibrates.

The alarm
Wake up! Wake up. Your stop, Kalyan, is next.

How to stop it

Press I'm awake. It is a large button and the only one on the screen, so you can hit it half asleep and in the dark.
Or press play or pause on your earphones, without taking the phone out at all.

The back button will not dismiss it, on purpose. The alarm keeps sounding until you actually answer, and it gives up one station past yours so it is not still shouting at you on the platform.

When you arrive

The app does not switch off the moment you arrive. It stays on while you get off, and offers two buttons.

Extend 10 min keeps Travel Mode on if you have a walk, a bridge or a second train ahead.
End now finishes the journey. Red always means a ride is ending, and it never means anything else in this app.

It also asks whether to save the route. Say yes and the same journey is one tap from the home screen next time. Your past rides are under History.

To end a journey early, while it is still running, press and hold End journey on the ride screen. A hold and not a tap, so a knock in your pocket cannot end a ride you are asleep on.

Pocket Pulse, if you want it

A separate and optional thing. It plays a short quiet sound every few minutes, so you know your phone is still with you without taking it out.

It is off until you switch it on, in Settings.
Every 2, 3, 5 or 10 minutes. Crowd mode is every 45 seconds, for a packed train.
With no earphones connected it plays out loud, which is worth remembering in a quiet carriage.
Hear it now in Settings plays it once so you know the sound.

Settings worth knowing

Setting	What it does
Travel Mode readiness	A list of what the app needs in order to wake you with the phone locked. Check it once, and again if a ride ever goes wrong.
Name every station	On by default. Off announces only your stop and any train change.
Share anonymous usage	On by default. Never your location, and never where you travel. Turn it off freely. See the privacy policy.
Send the last ride log	The most useful button on the page during this test. See below.

If something goes wrong

It probably will at some point. That is what a test is for, and a failure I hear about is worth more to me than a ride that went fine.

Do this first

Open Settings and press Send the last ride log, the same day if you can. It carries what the app actually did, second by second, which no description can. Nothing is sent unless you press it.

Then tell me four things

Where you got on, and where you were going.
What you expected to hear, and what you heard instead.
Roughly what time it happened.
Whether your earphones were connected.

The one report I need most: you did not get woken. Tell me even if you think it was your fault, and even if you got off fine anyway. A nap that worked is also worth a message.

Honest limits, today

Central and Western lines only. Suburban stations. No metro yet.
English only for the spoken lines, for now.
It uses battery. It watches GPS for your whole journey. Start a long ride with a decent charge. I am still measuring the real number, so I am not going to quote you one I cannot prove.
It cannot read the railway's system. There is no live train data behind it. It only knows where your phone is, which is exactly why it still works when the network does not.
Dadar is the hardest station on the line and gets the most attention from me. If anything odd happens there, that is the report I want most.

Questions, complaints and half formed thoughts all welcome, and nothing you send is too small. commuteguardian@gmail.com · Home · Privacy policy