Railway Ministry Mobile App Fails to Materialize; Kaifu Lee Recommends Ikamobile App Instead

Back before China’s Railway Ministry launched its new site and the focus moved to how it was still broken and how it apparently cost $52 million, the Ministry had announced that it was also working on mobile smartphone apps to enable mobile ticket purchasing, train notifications and scheduling announcements, with at least one app due by the end of September.

Well, it’s now October and — surprise! — there’s no sign of any official mobile apps. The Ministry says this is because the apps haven’t been perfected yet, although it does still plan to release them someday. Needless to say, there’s a fair amount of skepticism about this. Innovation Works founder Kaifu Lee took to his weibo account to have a little laugh at the Ministry’s expense and sneak in a little promotion for one of his startups:

A startup we’ve invested in, Ikamobile, has already made an app like this called Train Finder. It has gotten more than 10,000 downloads per day over the last two weeks. If the Railway Ministry wants to make a bid on it, just tell us, don’t spend another 300 million RMB!

Train Finder is indeed basically the app the Railway Ministry ought to have made. It allows users to log in to the 12306 ticket purchase site (and re-logs them in automatically when the site’s bugs log them out), check train times and ticket availability, and directly purchase tickets through the site. It’s available for free on iOS and Android, and if you live in China, it seems like the sort of thing you ought to start downloading right now.

Why can’t the Railway Ministry make something like this? It clearly isn’t for lack of money. But whether the issue is corruption or just general bureaucratic incompetence (or hey, both!) it’s good to know that there are startups out there that are willing to do the government’s work for it when the government fails. Well, it’s kind of good to know that…

This post was updated at 7:00 on October 3 to add a missing word in the weibo translation and to add a link to the weibo post in question.