Essential apps for living in Taiwan

The phone setup daily life here actually runs on — from the app that is basically Taiwan's operating system to the one that saves you when your battery dies at a night market.

The one everything runs on

Line

Not optional. Line is Taiwan's default for messaging — friends, landlords, bosses, your kid's school, government agencies, restaurants taking reservations, every business's customer service. Official accounts, group chats, Line Pay at checkout. If someone in Taiwan wants to reach you, they will ask for your Line, not your number. Install it before you land.

Getting around

• YouBike 2.0 — Taiwan's shared bikes are everywhere and absurdly cheap; the app shows station availability and handles registration (you'll link an EasyCard or credit card).
• 捷運Go — the official MRT app: route planning, fares, first/last train times, and station info for the Taipei metro.
• Bus+ (or a local bus tracker) — real-time bus arrivals, which matter because Taiwan buses are frequent but not schedule-bound. Locals swear by trackers over the official apps.
• T Express — the official High Speed Rail app: book, pay, and board with a QR code, skipping machines entirely. Essential the first time you do Taipei–Kaohsiung on a whim.
• Taxis and rides — Uber works in the cities; 55688 (Taiwan Taxi) is the local giant; Yoxi is the newer local favorite; Line Go books rides from inside Line. Having a couple installed covers you everywhere.
• Easy Wallet — companion app for your EasyCard (悠遊卡), the tap-everything transit card. Check balance and top-up history; the card itself you'll buy at any convenience store.

Food

• Uber Eats / foodpanda — the two delivery giants; coverage is excellent in cities and both have English interfaces. Most people keep both installed and compare fees.
• Inline — restaurant reservations and queue-taking; many popular spots only take bookings here. Seeing your live queue position beats standing outside for an hour.

Shopping

• Shopee (蝦皮) — the everything-marketplace; convenience-store pickup makes it painless even without perfect Chinese.
• Momo & PChome — Taiwan's big local e-commerce platforms; often faster delivery and better prices on electronics and household goods. Chinese-language interfaces, so this is where your reading practice pays rent.

Travel and weekends

• Klook & KKday — activity and ticket booking (attractions, day tours, SIM cards, HSR discount bundles); KKday is Taiwan-founded and both are heavily used domestically, not just by tourists.
• Agoda / Booking.com — hotel standards here as anywhere; Agoda often has the deeper Taiwan inventory.
• Taiwan Weather — the go-to weather app here; Taiwan weather changes by the hour and typhoon season is real, so a reliable local forecast (pulling Central Weather Administration data) earns its home-screen spot.

The little lifesavers

• ChargeSPOT — rent a power bank from a kiosk at one convenience store, return it at any other, anywhere in Taiwan. The app that has rescued every foreigner at least once.
• Google Translate — for menus and documents, the camera function remains magic. For conversations, see below — translation in the moment is a crutch that never teaches you the counter questions coming at you.

Meeting people

Taiwan's expat and local social scenes are unusually accessible if you know where they organize: Meetup for hiking groups, tech events, and the long-running language exchanges; Luma for the newer event scene; Timeleft and The Weekend Club for food and drinks with strangers (better than it sounds); Nomadtable for meeting people over fun activities; and Facebook, which remains where Taiwan's expat groups actually live — city groups, apartment hunting, buy/sell, all of it. Language exchanges deserve special mention: free, weekly in every city, and the single best pipeline from "new here" to "has Taiwanese friends."

And the Mandarin one

Every app above works better with a little Chinese — and daily life throws Mandarin at you no app on this list translates in time: the clerk's 有載具嗎？, the clinic's 掛號 counter, the landlord's phone call.

Learning the language properly? See the best apps for learning Chinese in Taiwan and our essential phrases to start speaking today.