“When a critical bug hits, we can identify, patch, and deploy an OTA fix in under 90 seconds from the first user report.”

When a transit app breaks, the impact is immediate. It is not a dip on a dashboard. It is thousands of riders stuck, staff fielding questions, and a city that cannot move smoothly.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) runs mission-critical mobile experiences for riders across New York City, and their digital services team treats reliability as a product requirement, not a nice-to-have.

They have earned deep trust in Expo as the platform behind their mobile strategy, especially for the capability they cannot live without: fast, controlled fixes in production.

MTA’s digital services team is about 20 people and operates like a startup inside one of the largest transit agencies in the world. They are responsible for:

• Realtime signage in subway stations
• Two public-facing mobile apps
• The public website
• Internal tools like Radar

The mobile team is small relative to the scale of the system. They serve roughly 350K daily active users who expect the transit experience to work 24/7.

The team ships two rider-facing apps to the App Store and Play Store:

TrainTime serves Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road riders. Riders can plan trips, buy tickets, and show them to conductors. MTA built TrainTime with Expo in 2022, and it holds a 4.9-star rating on 200K+ reviews.

MTA Subway & Bus App serves riders within the city. The current app store version was inherited from a previous team and is not built with Expo. The new version launching in Q1 2026 is built with Expo.

Will Fisher leads the digital services team. His history with Expo goes back to the early React Native era around 2017.

“For us, OTA updates are a safety net,” Will said. “Expo delivers them better than anyone.”

From day one, the decision came down to enterprise constraints:

• A small team could not afford separate iOS and Android codebases
• Production incidents had to be recoverable quickly
• Tooling needed to reduce operational risk, not add to it

React Native gave the team shared product logic. Expo made it practical to run that strategy in production, with services and libraries that feel cohesive and thoughtfully designed.

Today, the MTA team relies on Expo in three concrete ways:

• EAS Update for hotfixes to core flows like trip planning and ticket purchasing
• EAS Build as their CI/CD backbone, producing production builds on a roughly three-week cadence and handling code signing and platform configuration
• Expo libraries as the default choice when they exist, including location, image handling, calendar, and Sentry integration

For a team this size, reducing the “platform tax” matters. The fewer hours they spend managing certificates, push keys, or bespoke build infra, the more time they can spend improving the rider experience.

Their release process stays intentionally straightforward. They build, deploy, validate in beta, then promote to production. For critical user flows, they run manual QA instead of brittle automated visual tests.

For MTA, the proof has been operational.

“When a critical bug hits, we can identify, patch, and deploy an OTA fix in under 90 seconds from the first user report,” Will said. “That keeps the NYC mayhem at bay.”

In practice, they often hear about a broken core flow within 90 seconds of it happening, either from staff or riders. OTA updates let them resolve issues before disruption spreads, and without waiting on an app store review cycle.

That one capability changes how the team thinks about risk:

• They can ship improvements with more confidence, because there is a clear path to recovery
• They can keep releases smaller and more frequent, because the pipeline is predictable
• They can onboard engineers faster, because the stack is consistent across platforms

MTA’s requirements match what many enterprise mobile teams live with: reliability expectations that are unforgiving, tight staffing, and incident response that is part of the product’s promise.

Expo’s value here is operational confidence. The team gets a modern SDK for building cross-platform apps, plus a production-ready model for builds and updates that fits how serious organizations operate.

In Q1 2026, MTA plans to launch the new Subway & Bus app on Expo, bringing the same operating model to their largest ridership base.

They also plan to explore Workflows to keep improving their release pipeline, and Hosting to support API Routes as their product surface grows.

MTA’s story is a straightforward signal for enterprise developers: trust is earned in production. Expo has earned that trust by helping a small team ship mission-critical apps, recover quickly when issues arise, and keep the system moving.