Food, Fun, and Free Stuff: 23 Super-Useful Apps for Living in London

19 July 2024
Relocation

Useful Apps for Living in London

Coming up: toilets and trains, rolling and romancing, sunshine and snacks, saving time and money, and 23 useful apps for living in London.

You’re living in London.

(… or you will be).

And you’re looking for the city’s best apps.

Well… in this time-saving life-hacking pro-tipping guide, your apartment-offering friends at Homelike have brought you exactly that.

So: grab your phone and hop on the app store—here are the 23 most useful apps for living in London!

CityMapper

Best for: navigating public transport, and getting around the city

For navigating and understanding public transport, CityMapper is pretty similar to Google Maps.

… but in our experience, it’s better:

Estimated trip times are more accurate
Prices are listed for each journey option
Cycling info (and coverage) is safer and more comprehensive
You get info on which exits, entrances, platforms and train carriages to use—excellent for saving time
It offers various walking options—choose the ‘Main Roads’ setting if you feel safer on brightly-lit streets.

Note: Google Maps is still a super-useful app for living in London (especially for finding things to do, accessing websites and opening hours, and choosing places to hang out).

TfLGo

Best for: knowing what’s delayed, and when

TfL is ‘Transport for London,’ a government body managing most of the city’s transport.

… and because it’s managed by TfL, the TfLGo app is the city’s #1 way to keep updated with delays, problems, maintenance works, solutions, reroutes, and bus replacement services.

For real-time public-transport info, this is one of the most useful apps for living in London.

Uber

Best for: riding by taxi

If you want a taxi, you use the Uber app.

Easy. Simple. Universally-understood.

Top tip: if you struggle to find an Uber (you probably won’t), try Bolt instead.

Top tip 2: if you want to take a London taxi in heavy traffic, use Gett. While Bolt and Uber use standard cars, Gett uses London’s iconic black cabs. And here’s the important part: standard cars aren’t allowed to use bus lanes, but black cabs are.

Too Good to Go

Best for: eating well, cheaply

London’s #1 app for reducing food waste, Too Good to Go lets you munch on meals and morsels that would have otherwise gone in the trash.

The app gives you a list of eateries—along with times when those eateries will be disposing of food. If you reserve some of that food, you can pick it up before it’s binned (at a massive discount).

So: you save the planet, you save some money, and you get a nice tasty meal.

For good food at good prices, this is one of the most useful apps for living in London

Top tip: for even more food waste, check out Olio. It’s sort of like Too Good To Go—except all food is free, the pickup times aren’t so limited, and you get other freebies like crafts and furniture. But: while Too Good To Go is used throughout all of London, Olio is popular only in some areas.

Santander Cycles

Best for: cycling around the city without your own bike

Like many big cities, London is home to a city-wide bike-sharing scheme.

(… and it’s called ‘Santander Cycles’).

It offers 800 docking stations and 12,000 bikes dotted around the entire city, and is available 24/7, 365 days a year. The app lets you take the bikes and pay for them, and has a map with real-time availability.

The bikes each have three gears, they’re surprisingly smooth and well-maintained, and they’re very affordable.

If you like cycling, this is one of the most useful apps for living in London.

Toilets4London

Best for: peeing and pooping

Sometimes, you need a public-use toilet.

Often, you don’t know where to find one.

But with the feature-packed map-based Toilets4London, your bladder and bowels will always find some sweet sweet relief.

Opentable

Best for: reserving restaurant tables

If you often eat out, this is one of the most useful apps for living in London.

You can use Opentable to find restaurants, read reviews, scout recommendations, look for popular eateries, and even see which restaurants have available tables right now.

Met Office Weather

Best for: checking the weather

The ‘Meteorological Office’ are the UK’s official weather and climate guys…

… so of all the UK’s weather apps, this one’s the most reliable.

Ubereats, Justeat, and Deliveroo

Best for: eating at home

These are three different apps, but they’re all very similar.

You go on the apps, you order some food, it gets delivered to your home, you eat it.

Simple.

(Deliveroo is probably the most popular of the three).

Monzo

Best for: banking, but without a branch

Monzo is the UK’s most popular online bank:

Opening an account is super fast
They have over 9 million customers
Their online support is swift and helpful
They’re an actual bank protected by the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme
You don’t need to mess around with visiting any physical branches (cos they don’t have any physical branches, lol)

Monzo also offers many helpful time-saving features, like bill-splitting, savings pots, budget-trackers, and spending notifications.

Taskrabbit

Best for: getting jobs done, without doing them yourself

Let’s say you can’t be bothered to clean your home. Or wash your car. Or do some paintwork. Or assemble some flatpack furniture.

On TaskRabbit, you can get someone to do it for you.

(you can even get someone to wait in a queue for you. Weird).

Dice

Best for: finding nights out and events

London is home to thousands of nightlife venues.

And thousands of events and festivals.

… so it’s hard to know what to do, where to go, and what’s on offer.

But not with Dice!

You can use the app to find live music, late-night raves, comedy nights, underground events, cabarets, festivals, and plenty more.

Top tip for more boogying and boozing: if you like techno music and other DJ events, you’ll think Resident Advisor is even better.

Beeline

Best for: finding quiet (and suitable!) cycle routes

More bikes!

London is great for cycling.

… but some paths and roads are busy, and some infrastructure is subpar.

London lifehack: Beeline’s top-class navigation helps you avoid all the bad aspects of cycling in London.

It offers quiet routes, many ride options, real-time reroutes, Strava compatibility, simple navigation, and well-curated rides. Better than Google Maps—and for riding in London, even better than Komoot!

Hinge

Best for: dating, without enduring Tinder hell

Dating apps are VERY popular in the UK.

And of all the well-known dating apps, Hinge has the best overall reputation (if you’re looking for romance or something long-term).

So if you want to meet relatively normal people on a relatively normal date, it’s probably your best option.

If that’s not what you’re looking for, we’re not here to judge you 😉

HotUKDeals

Best for: good prices on miscellaneous products

A crowd-sourced compilation of deals and discounts, this is a great app for nabbing low-price bargains in high-price London.

You’ll find a wide (and weird) range of stuff here.

Currently listed on the app’s first page are pajamas, watches, drones, toilet seats, underwear, football shirts, and day tickets for theme parks.

For bargains, it’s one of the most useful apps for living in London.

Parkopedia

Best for: finding a place to park

Car parking in London is notoriously nightmarish:

Why can’t I find any parking? Why has this idiot parked across three bays? And does this glass-ridden space really cost £20 for one hour?

With Parkopedia, you can avoid it all.

A simple map-based app, you enter your location, and get info on prices, locations, and how many spots are available.

If you’ll be driving around the city, Parkopedia is one of the most useful apps for living in London.

Wise

Best for: holding, sending, and using many currencies (affordably!)

Formerly known as ‘TransferWise,’ Wise is a multi-currency money service allowing you to send more than 40 currencies to over 160 nations.

Foreign exchange fees are SUPER low—some currency conversion fees sit at 0.33%.

… so if you’re a remote worker, digital nomad, or anyone else who deals with more than one currency, this is one of the most useful apps for living in London.

Important note: don’t use Wise as your only bank, cos it isn’t an actual bank (although it functions like one). Instead, the Wise guys (lol) call themselves “a trusted Money Services transmitter […] regulated by Federal and State regulators.”

Best for: keeping in contact

You probably already have WhatsApp…

… but it’s the UK’s most-used messaging service (maybe with the exception of Facebook Messenger).

Other messaging services (like Signal, Telegram and WeChat), aren’t particularly popular.

Tesco Clubcard

Best for: big deals in a big shop

Tesco is London’s most common and well-known supermarket.

So you should get yourself a Tesco Clubcard.

It’s free to sign up, and it gives you exclusive access to many in-store deals and discounts.

Some savings are pretty unimpressive—£1 off some fruit, £0.50 off some biscuits, etc.

But some savings are incredible—current deals include a 35% reduction on some beers, a 50% reduction on some pizzas, and a 25% reduction on Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

HelloFresh

Best for: cooking, without having to use your brain

You want to cook.

But you don’t know what you want to cook.

… and you can’t be bothered to buy the ingredients, weigh them, or look up the recipes.

Well, HelloFresh has you covered.

Every week, you get different recipe cards delivered to your door. Those recipe cards come with cooking instructions, the exact ingredients you need, and the exact measurements and quantities you need them in.

Yep, this seems a bit unnecessary and indulgent. Until you try it.

Amazon Prime

Best for: swift and speedy deliveries

Yep, you’ve already heard of Amazon Prime.

But according to the official Amazon site, they deliver “three out of four items the same or next day in London.”

So: in London, the service is very reliable.

And in addition to speedy deliveries, you of course also get all the other perks of Amazon Prime.

Trainline

Best for: finding cheap train tickets

Trainline is a transport comparison tool—sort of like Skyscanner, but for train rides instead of plane rides.

Trainline isn’t particularly useful within London; but it’s VERY useful for venturing beyond it. To get the best prices, book as in-advance as you can.

Another top UK train-travel trip: if you’ll be using trains even semi-regularly, get yourself a UK railcard. With most UK railcards, every train ticket you buy is reduced by a massive 33%.

Homelike

Best for: finding a place to live

We’re Homelike, and while we’re not an app, we are one of the best resources for finding short term rentals in London

When you first move to the city, it’s hard to find a place to live…

But we’re here to rescue you: we have many serviced apartments in London. They’re all clean, cozy, fully-furnished, and ready to move into today. You don’t have to worry about installing internet or utilities, you don’t need to deal with dodgy landlords, and our lovely homes are dotted around various parts of the city.

A simple solution to one of London’s biggest problems!