In today’s day and age, it seems like every week there’s a nifty new app that will gives you the lowest price on groceries, access to better shared cars and taxis, and translates languages more quickly and accurately. But there are some true essentials that lead the pack, which are pretty indispensable for maximising life here in Beijing.

JSS
Designed with expats in mind and focusing on high-quality English customer service, JSS offers same-day grocery and food delivery from expat-friendly restaurants and grocery stores like Jenny Wang’s. JSS truly tries to connect with its customers, which is why it launched its Brand Ambassador program.

Sherpa’s
Sherpa’s provides a food and grocery delivery service but only works with top-quality restaurants, which means a less wide range of options compared to its Chinese-language counterparts but mainly consists of western-friendly selections. Sherpa’s couriers are trained to ensure a quick, courteous, and correct delivery.

Meituan
Meituan is one of several local food and grocery delivery apps that gets the job done when you’re in a pinch. They generally deliver within the hour and offer a much wider range of restaurants and grocery stores than the earlier two expat-friendly English language apps, if you can navigate its Chinese interface. Plus, you can also rent the yellow Meituan shared bikes using this app!

JingDong (JD)
In the realm of shopping, JD is great for household products and groceries, where you can find almost everything from spinach to stereos. It’s a Chinese-language app but if you can figure it out, it could save you lots of time and effort searching for a brick-and-mortar store for what you need.

Weidian
This is WeChat’s answer to TaoBao, which offers listings by small local business owners with artisanal crafts, foodstuffs, or supplies. Sustainable brands started by expat entrepreneurs such as The Bulk House, KIYANI Botanics, Greeniche, Dancing Yak Handicrafts and The Green Room are some examples of stores you can find on it.

TaoBao
TaoBao is so ubiquitous that it needs no introduction. And if you were first introduced to BaoPals – the English language expat-friendly version of the local app – you really should try TaoBao because of its easy image search function, which we explain in this article here.

Xianyu
A sister to TaoBao, Xianyu is the secondhand version of the popular shopping app and offers plenty of gently-used, practically new clothes, furniture, and other goods. This is great for kids’ stuff which they tend to outgrow quickly. This article tells you all about it!

Dazhong Dianping
Dazhong Dianping or simply Dianping, is essentially what I call the Chinese Yelp, which offers guides for lifestyle and entertainment including restaurants, hotels, cinemas, through business listings, ratings system, and comments section. You can check the app for reviews and recommended specials before you choose a restaurant, helping you and your family to avoid unpleasant surprises. Additionally, paying through the app usually grants you a discount.

Dear Translate
This is editor Mina Yan’s pick of all the free translation apps that are out there right now, and there are a lot. It has a camera translate function that quickly translates the text in front of you and also has an awesome conversation translation function. Best of all, of course, it’s free!

Pleco Chinese Dictionary is probably the best offline Chinese – English dictionary. It integrates dictionaries with an amazing amount (over 110,000) of frequently-updated entries and example sentences with Pinyin, document reader, flashcard system with fullscreen handwriting input, and a live Optical Character Reader (OCR). It also includes audio to help your pronunciation and displays stroke order diagrams showing you how to draw each character.

Tell us which apps you can’t live without here in Beijing (aside from WeChat and Alipay…) in the comments below!

KEEP READING: 5 Free Learning Apps to Help Level Up During Summer

Images: Pexels, Vivienne Tseng-Rush

Christiana Zhu proudly calls herself a ‘Chiwi’ (a kiwi of Chinese ethnicity). A New Zealand expat from Auckland, she was exposed to the Asian market while working in the NZ tourism industry. She moved to China in 2014 to explore the Chinese market, was hired by WildChina for a project and eventually stayed on as head of marketing with WildChina.The move to Beijing hugely impacted her physically; she developed allergies and severe eczema, while her body adjusted to the air quality, different environment, and foods. In an effort to manage her allergies, triggered by severe lactose intolerance amongst other factors, she tried various solutions, and that’s how she discovered coconut milk based yogurt, which has really helped reduce her skin related issues.

“When I realized how beneficial it was, I wanted to share it with friends, in the hope of opening their eyes and minds to new healthy options for people with food allergies, who might have difficulty finding certain foods here in Beijing”, Christiana tells us.

“My friend made coconut yogurt for me and taught me to make it for myself, as it wasn’t available anywhere in China, including Taobao! I started taking it to parties and gatherings. It slowly got popular and then, urged by my supportive friends, I tried selling it at Farms to Neighbors farmers market. I really did not expect it to be such a huge hit. I sold out every single time and started getting WeChat orders for the week”, she adds.

From there, the business developed naturally. There is a huge demand in Beijing for dairy free products, especially yogurts. Expanding to the Hatchery has helped with wider visibility. Since it’s still a part time venture, she continues with her day job and is somehow managing to keep up with this fast growing business as well.

Yeyo is only six months old and very much in its infancy right now. However Christiana is taking it one step at a time and enjoying the steady growth, while entertaining further expansion ideas. “The most challenging part is to find the time and energy to keep it going! Yet, every time I feel tired and get tempted to scale back, I get a message or feedback from some client telling me how much they enjoy my yogurt, how they’ve not had yogurt for years due to allergies and can’t thank me enough for making it available for them.  They send me pictures with their yogurt! That re-energizes me and helps me plow through, to keep going”.

There’s no competition for her in the Beijing area, especially because it’s also unsweetened yogurt, which is hard to find in China. She offers dairy free yogurt, with the consistency of a Greek style yogurt, in three flavors every week. Two are standard, the pure yogurt and yogurt with honey. The third flavor varies every week, with a seasonal fruit compote at the bottom to make it interesting. You can find her yogurts at Farm to Neighbors Farmers Market, at the Hatchery and through WeChat as well. They come in 150ml glass jars for RMB 30, or a pack of four in a cooler bag for RMB 100. You can get a discount for recycling glass jars to reduce wastage. The delivery fee varies based on your location, and the yogurt needs to be delivered to your door within an hour, for it to be fresh. It’s usually around RMB 16 for CBD area and RMB 24 for the hutongs. And that name? It’s simple. Yeyo comes from the Chinese words ‘ye’ for coconut and ‘yo’ for yogurt!

Photo: Courtesy of Christana Zhu, Yeyo Yogurt.