A good IT system for managing status data would feed the same information to the displays and the Smartphone Apps. So in a well designed system "updates" would be equally good or bad all across the board. If the online system requires a person to update it rather than getting fed automatically from the status data, then it is not part of a well designed 21st century system, and is better to avoid unless absolutely necessary. ^_^ Admittedly in some backward places that is all one has.
In some cases international travelers may have problem in carrying out activities that require an authenticated registration. Those who have used the Indian Railways IRCTC system before this year know how hard it was to get an authenticated registration and login on the system. The authentication is intimately tied to your mobile phone number, and in the past they could not handle numbers that were not within the +91 country code area. Basically without that the only other way to buy a ticket or get a reservation is at a ticket window, which is even harder when you are trying to get a reservation while sitting in a different country.
So far, I am not aware of any Status App that requires that kind of authentication. If you can download and install the App on your platform you are good to go. If your platform is other than Android or iOS, heaven help you. Some apps are now available only on Android, but AFACT always there is a mobile web interface to fall back on.
Week before last, when I was in the UK, I exclusively used the very useful National Rail App for planning and actually making connections etc. some of them 3-4 minute connections, which would have been completely impossible if I was only depending on station boards. OTOH, when at a station I preferred the station boards since they gave me a much broader view of the state of the world at that station in a single glance.
So both have their uses.
