First are in Leeds too..
I find the reliability of service directly proportional to affluence (or lack there of) of the services route.
As for the keys being hardcoded, that would explain why the ticket service works now... As opposed to how it used to (not) work on a Monday morning when tens of thousands of commuters all tried using the ticket app to find it moaning you needed to connect to the Internet because the servers been DDoS'd by normal, predictable surges in users all trying to get their weekly ticket bought and used...