The 10 apps you actually need in Lisbon

Ask around and you'll get ten answers, six of them restaurants. This is the list I actually send people.

Google Maps and WhatsApp are assumed. WhatsApp especially — your landlord, your accountant and eventually your kid's school will all use it, and not one of them will answer an email. What follows is the Portugal-specific stuff, in roughly the order it starts to matter. Everything is free, and everything here runs on both iPhone and Android — I check, because two of the government ones look like they might not.

MB WAY — the one everyone assumes you have

The first time someone asks for your MB WAY you'll go looking for a bank setting you missed. Fair enough: it is one. MB WAY moves money between phone numbers, instantly and free, and it's how people settle up here — friends, the man who comes to fix the boiler, market stalls, most small shops in the country.

You switch it on inside your Portuguese bank's app, so it waits on an account and a Portuguese number. Once you have both it takes five minutes.

The part nobody mentions is MB NET, which generates single-use card numbers. Any checkout you're unsure about gets a card that works once, for one amount. I use that more than I use the payments.

Check your bank supports MB WAY before you promise to send anyone money. The Portuguese banks all do. Several of the app-only accounts people arrive with don't.

Autenticação.Gov — the key to all the paperwork

Portuguese admin happens online, and online happens behind the Chave Móvel Digital. This app is the CMD in practice: it approves the login and it signs the document.

Finanças, Segurança Social, ePortugal — each one opens with a tap once it's working, and the print-sign-scan-email cycle drops out of your life entirely.

Activating the CMD costs you a counter visit, usually at a Loja do Cidadão, usually a morning. Everyone puts this off. Everyone regrets it the first time they need something signed while they're out of the country.

navegante — stop queuing at the ticket machine

The monthly pass is among the cheapest in Europe. The machines that sell it produce one of the slowest queues in the city, and on the first of the month at Marquês de Pombal it is genuinely bleak.

The app tops the card up over NFC — hold the card flat against the back of the phone and don't move it until the app stops complaining — and tells you the balance, which the machines are strangely bad at. Getting the card itself is covered in the transport how-to.

Citymapper — better than Maps once hills are involved

Google Maps does not understand that Calçada do Combro is a wall. Citymapper does. Its walking times account for gradient, which here is the difference between a ten-minute stroll and turning up somewhere unfit to be seen.

Everything else lands in one screen too: metro, Carris buses, trams, the river ferries, Gira docks, scooters, a live Bolt price next to all of it.

Past the Segunda Circular the data thins out and I go back to Maps.

Bolt — usually cheaper than Uber here

Both work. Bolt tends to come in a euro or two under Uber on the same route, has more cars in the middle of town, and rents you a scooter from the same app.

Two things I learned the expensive way. Prices after a match at the Luz or a concert at the Altice Arena are punishing, and the airport pickup zone is a good five minutes' walk from arrivals — fine if you know, less fine at 1am with a suitcase.

Keep Uber on the phone for the nights Bolt decides a three-kilometre ride is worth €22.

CP — trains to Sintra, Cascais and Porto

One real job: buying Alfa Pendular and Intercidades seats before they're gone, which on a Friday or Sunday they will be.

Book Porto a fortnight out and it's cheap. Book it that morning and it very much isn't. The ticket lives on your phone as a QR code, so the counter queue at Santa Apolónia stops being your problem.

Don't reach for it on the Sintra, Cascais or Azambuja lines — those run on navegante, so tap in with the card. Also, it logs you out about once a month, for no reason anyone has explained.

idealista — every agency in the country, warts and all

Every agency in the country posts here. That's the appeal and the problem: the same flat appears four times at three prices, next to listings that went months ago.

Set an alert on a saved search anyway. The flats worth having go the day they appear, and the people who get them are the ones who replied within the hour.

Then use the map view with price history, which is the fastest available education in what a street should cost — the number newcomers get wrong most expensively. One hard rule while you're in there: money never moves before you've stood in the flat. The scams guide covers how that request usually arrives.

SNS 24 — the health system in your pocket

Once you're registered at a centro de saúde and hold a número de utente, this carries the number, your prescriptions and your vaccination record, and books GP appointments without the hold music.

Portuguese only, realistically, and no use at all until the utente registration comes through. Install it that day rather than this one.

Worth saving separately: 808 24 24 24, the nurse triage line sitting behind it. Very good at telling you whether this is a hospital or a paracetamol.

Cartão Continente — the discount card locals never shut up about

Free, entirely digital, and the discounts are money rather than points theatre.

What people miss is that each week's offers have to be activated in the app before you shop. Tap them all on the walk over, scan the app at the till, and the savings come back as a balance you spend on a later shop.

Portuguese-only, and you're trading your shopping habits for it. A household doing a weekly shop still ends the year meaningfully up.

Too Good To Go — dinner for the price of a coffee

Restaurants and pastelarias sell whatever's left at closing, unseen, for €3 to €6. Around Baixa, Príncipe Real and Campo de Ourique there's enough of it that dinner turns into a lottery you mostly win.

The pastelaria bags are the ones to want and they're claimed by mid-morning, so it's something you sort the night before rather than at seven when you're already hungry.

Not worth the space

The operator apps. Carris and Metro de Lisboa each cover one slice of a network Citymapper handles whole.

Tourist city passes. You'll see the castle once, in year three, when someone visits.

A second delivery app, at least at first. Glovo and Uber Eats both work, and you'll pick a side within a fortnight without any help from me.

Anything that arrives by WhatsApp asking for your NIF to "verify" something. Your tax number gets read out at tills and written on invoices. It doesn't get sent to people who message you first.

Two more that earn their place if they apply to you: Gira for EMEL's e-bikes, and a parking app if you're keeping a car in the centre, which I'd talk you out of first.