Yes, this is one of the very few things that I think that T has done very well - the decision to release their data out to other people before they started doing anything with it themselves, as it seems the hobbyists have put together things that are far better than anything they've done - people seem to suffer a vaccuum of competence if they're within the organization itself.

I haven't actually seen any of the MBTA's real-time boards myself because I don't take the T much at those stations - I remember hoping for train time announcements all the way back when the LED boards were put up, instead of the sort of 24-hour propaganda machines we got instead.

I suppose my point about applications was that you need Internet access for these applications no matter where you are, and that an app version would make no difference... but after a couple of the comments above, I can see that you'd want to keep traffic down to an absolute minimum for people accessing it via a smartphone.