Best apps for expats in the UK
When I first moved to the UK, I didn’t have a smartphone. Yes, really. It made life much more difficult than it needed to be. By the time I looked back six years later, I had a collection of apps that helped with everyday life in England. These were the ones I was using and talking about in my original 2022 post.
Trains, buses and finding the right coins
Back home in Ontario, I very rarely took the train. Here, I found myself using it often, sometimes just to get to the next town. Trainline became my go-to app for buying tickets. I liked having departure and arrival times in one place, and when it suggested a cheaper ticket that worked for the journey I wanted, I was very happy to take that option.
I also liked having the choice between using the website at home and the app while I was out. If I remembered that I needed tickets for something the following week, I could buy them on my laptop. On the go, I could use my phone instead. It was straightforward, which was exactly what I wanted from something I needed fairly often.
My early experience of buses was less convenient. I was taking them a lot when I first arrived, and the services I used weren’t contactless. I paid with coins and needed the right change, with the added feeling that the driver might hate me forever if I didn’t have it. By the time I made my app list, I really wished I’d had those newer ways of buying bus tickets when I first needed them. My point was to find the service for the area you lived in, rather than assume one bus app covered everywhere.
For parking, I’d found RingGo useful in Kent. In a car park that used it, I could select where I was parked, choose how long I wanted to stay and pay by card through the app. I could also keep track of the time remaining. That was much easier for me than trying to have enough coins and then sorting out a paper ticket. I thought it could be useful even if you were getting a lift from a partner or friend and wanted to pay for the parking yourself.
Some apps only mattered when I needed them
I wasn’t using every app on my phone constantly. I had my mobile provider’s app, Three, and my Lloyds banking app ready for the times I needed them. Up to that point, the only time I’d physically gone into the bank had been to set up my account. After that, I did my banking through the app or on my laptop. I knew losing high street banks affected other people, but it hadn’t affected how I personally did my banking.
Checking the weather mattered for a different reason. I no longer had a car, so I was walking and taking the train everywhere. My experience wasn’t that it rained all the time, but that rain could arrive very suddenly. The basic weather app on my iPhone did the job for me, and I liked the little widget on my Apple Watch that told me when rain was expected next. It helped me plan my outdoor activities around it.
Calling home and trying to find friends
My mum and I spoke almost exclusively through FaceTime. We used Wi-Fi, it was easy, and I had no complaints about it. WhatsApp had been less familiar before I moved. I hadn’t been much of a smartphone person in Ontario, and neither I nor a lot of the friends I knew there had heard of it. I wasn’t sure whether that meant it was less popular or simply that my own circle hadn’t come across it. In the UK, I found it very popular for communicating with friends.
Making friends was hard, and making them in a foreign country was a special kind of hard. I’d had some experience with Bumble BFF, an app for connecting with people who were also looking for friends. I mentioned Friender as another option, but I hadn’t used that one myself. Those were different levels of experience, and I couldn’t pretend I’d personally tried both.
Not everything on my list was about getting through a necessary task. I’d also tried Duolingo to brush up on my French after getting bored one day. I’d studied French in Canada but hadn’t continued with it, and I’d never been good at it. This time I found it fun, complete with a very cute green owl. Having these apps didn’t make life in the UK suddenly easy, but they helped. I could think of plenty of embarrassing moments they might have saved me from if I’d had a smartphone at the start.
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