The Ride Ahead

Philip Cheang -

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Sakay.ph blog! It’s been a while since Thomas and I quietly launched the very first version of Sakay.ph — exactly 700 days since October 1, 2013, the deadline of the Philippine Transit App Challenge.

We built and designed Sakay.ph 1.0 because the frustrations of transport in Metro Manila were something both very personal and widespread. While we couldn't put up any new train tracks or bus lines of our own, we thought that we could solve the problem of information: How do I commute to my destination?

After a few weeks of work, Thomas and I hesitantly brought the site live. We wondered if anyone would use the site, or find its directions useful. In two weeks, we hit more than 5000 users, found ourselves on TV news, overloaded a poor phone, and won the Open Community Award. Wow.

What has happened since then? We relaunched in February of this year, and brought about a lot of amazing new features and changes:

  • An awesome new look and feel. Shiny.
  • Responsive maps. See where you're going, on your phone!
  • Embeddable widgets. Put a Sakay.ph map on your website, and help customers commute to your restaurant or cafe!
  • A Sakay.ph app for your iPhone or Android device!
  • More data and routes! We've got the Fort buses, Comet e-Jeeps, and way more coming.
  • A responsive social media team answering your questions on Facebook and Twitter.
  • Free access via Facebook's Internet.org (We‘re pretty proud of this one.)

But most amazingly:

  • 500,000 of you have used Sakay.ph so far.

Thank you so so much. Hearing you guys tell us about how Sakay.ph has been helpful has kept us pushing to develop even more features.

The ride so far has been fun and exciting, but trust us when we say that the journey has only just begun. We hope you'll stick around for the next stop!

—phi