Chinedu Echeruo’s HopStop will shut down next month

The app maker, rumored to have been acquired for the price of $1 billion in July 2013, provides transit and mapping services for 140 cities worldwide including New York City, Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington, D.C.

Apple-owned transit app HopStop will no longer be available starting in October, according to a notice on the HopStop.com website.

Apple has confirmed it will shut down popular transit and directions service HopStop by the end of October. The iPhone and iPad apps for the service are also no longer available in the App Store. Apple’s Maps app was seriously lagging behind the strong competition from Google especially when catering to city folk.

Public transit app maker HopStop, Inc.is to cease offering its services some two years after being acquired by Apple.

On the other hand, HopStop’s specialty was transit directions in a generous list of cities around the world. It’s unclear just how Apple might integrate this new tech into its existing product lineup (or mapping services), but it could certainly help the company bolster its location-tracking services. In additional to the six American cities, Maps will support transit directions for 300 Chinese cities.

Sure enough, the release of iOS 9 on September 16 will include transit directions for the first time. Maps now features Transit view, bringing you public transit information with routes and directions. Apple removed Google Maps after a five-year agreement with Google expired. Cook even pointed out several mapping alternatives that Apple users could install to regain the mapping functions they had when Google Maps was part of the previous versions of iOS. This link is also where you go when you want to customize the types of public transmit you want Maps to return, along with setting a custom departure or arrival time should you want to plan ahead by selecting Options in the top-right corner of the screen.