HanoBus

Real-time GPS bus tracking for Rwanda — know exactly where your bus is, when it arrives, and the fastest route to your destination.

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🚌 What is HanoBus?

HanoBus is a real-time public bus tracking mobile application built for Rwandan commuters. It gives passengers live GPS locations of buses, estimated arrival times, and intelligent route planning — all from their smartphone.

💡 What Inspired Us

Every day in Kigali, millions of people stand at bus stops with no idea when their bus will arrive. There are no digital boards, no tracking systems, no reliable schedules. You either wait and hope, or you walk.

We experienced this ourselves as students commuting daily. We missed classes, arrived late to important commitments, and wasted hours of our lives at bus stops — not because buses weren't running, but because we had no information.

That frustration became HanoBus.

🏗️ How We Built It

We designed and developed HanoBus as a cross-platform mobile application using React Native, allowing us to target both Android and iOS with a single codebase.

Our backend is powered by Firebase — Firestore for real-time data syncing, Firebase Authentication for user management, and Cloud Functions for server-side logic. GPS tracking is handled through integration with location APIs that feed live bus coordinates into the app.

The UI/UX was designed with the Rwandan commuter in mind — simple, fast, and available in Kinyarwanda, French, and English.

We also built a companion responsive website as a public-facing landing page.

Development process:

  • We held structured planning sessions and used Slack and Trello to coordinate tasks
  • UI/UX was designed and prototyped before any code was written
  • Frontend and backend were developed in parallel across the team
  • We conducted live testing at real bus stops to validate GPS accuracy

⚙️ Key Features

  • Live Bus Tracking — real-time GPS locations of buses on active routes
  • Arrival Estimates — predicted time until the next bus reaches your stop
  • Route Planning — find the most efficient route to your destination
  • Multi-language Support — Kinyarwanda, French, and English
  • Push Notifications — alerts for delays and route disruptions

🧗 Challenges We Faced

1. Internet connectivity during testing Rwanda has great coverage in urban areas, but connectivity drops during peak hours. We adapted by scheduling testing sessions during off-peak times and building the app to handle intermittent connections gracefully.

2. Multi-language complexity Supporting three languages simultaneously — including Kinyarwanda which has limited developer resources — required careful UI design so that no layout broke when text length changed across languages. We solved this by simplifying the UI structure.

3. Remote team coordination Coordinating development across team members in different locations was challenging. We moved to regular in-person planning sessions and used async tools heavily between sessions.

4. GPS accuracy in dense urban areas Bus GPS signals in Kigali's busier zones showed drift. We implemented smoothing logic to filter erratic coordinates and give commuters a reliable position reading.

📚 What We Learned

  • Building for a real user in a real city is completely different from building demo projects
  • Transport data is messy — you have to clean and validate it before it's useful
  • User trust is earned through reliability, not features — if the GPS is wrong once, users lose confidence
  • Designing for multiple languages from day one is far easier than retrofitting later

🌍 What's Next

HanoBus is targeting full public launch with deployment on Google Play and the Apple App Store, alongside formal partnerships with Rwanda's transport operators to get GPS hardware on buses and build a sustainable data pipeline.

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