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Apps for expats and digital nomads to stay close to friends

Two different jobs get filed under staying close to friends abroad. WhatsApp carries the thread and Marco Polo or Locket puts a face on it, and on that job the existing lists are fine. I have nothing to add there. The second job is the calendar: your friend books your city for the 14th to the 18th and you hear about it on the 19th, from a story. On 6 September 2026 I opened the eight apps that keep showing up on expat and nomad roundups, and not one of them stores a city and a pair of dates for a trip that has not happened yet. Prices below come from the App Store and Play listings, plus Discord's and Nomads.com's own pages, all checked that day.

The apps, compared

What the contact apps are good at

Marco Polo I would pay for. The free tier keeps unlimited groups and chats and puts no cap on the length of a video, which is most of the product, so I have never had a reason to. Plus runs $79.99 a year for one person and $159.99 for a family of six, and buys playback speed, storage and a handful of extras on top of that. Version 0.1590.0 landed on 31 August 2026 with 2,158,971 ratings behind it, and the Play listing carries no ads label.

Locket is a widget. Friends' photos appear on your home screen, there is nothing to open, and 560,162 US ratings say people like it. The Android listing says Contains ads. Its App Store privacy card puts Location under Data Linked to You and Identifiers under data used to track you, which is a lot of surface area for a photo widget.

BeReal still has the sharpest idea in the group, one prompt a day with everybody posting into the same hour. Voodoo bought it in June 2024 for 500 million euros on an announcement claiming more than 40 million active users, and the Play listing now carries ads. Discord is the only thing here built for a four-hour voice call across four time zones. Over 500 million downloads, a free tier that covers what most friend groups need, and Nitro at $2.99 or $9.99 a month for cosmetics and bigger uploads.

WhatsApp carries almost all of it, and it drops people on a number change. From r/expats, October 2025: "…I accidentally got dropped from the group chat when I switched from my American→Japanese phone, I lost touch with many of them." Changing your number is an ordinary part of moving countries, and a social graph shaped like an address book does not survive it. Keep a second channel with the four people who matter, on something tied to an account rather than a SIM.

Life360 shows up on expat lists because it shares location. Over 100 million downloads, a $24.99 Platinum tier, and it was built for parents and teenagers, which is why the driving report is the flagship feature.

When you have a base and your friends come to you

From r/expats in March 2025, 139 upvotes and 146 comments: "I have friends visiting the country I live, they even coincidentally got a hotel next to my job, but they didn't make plans to hang out."

A hotel next to the job. Nobody had lost touch. The other half of that complaint sits in a thread from November 2024: "is it normal that, once you move to another country, it's like implied that you will ALWAYS be the one visiting". Both of them come out of one missing signal, which is that friends book flights and hotels without crossing any channel where you would see it, and the first you know is a story on day two.

So put your city in your Instagram bio and your WhatsApp About, where a friend sees it in the week they are actually booking. Then ask for the date. "Let me know when you're around" reliably produces nothing, so ask which flight they are looking at. The one that costs nothing after setup puts your home city somewhere a friend's trip gets matched against it automatically, so the notification fires when they book rather than when they land, which none of the eight apps above will do.

When neither of you has a base

From r/digitalnomad, December 2024: "curious how you all stay connected with friends, or find out who's in your city besides Instagram or current social media… Got many moments where I found out a friend was nearby but left already."

With both of you moving, there is no home city to anchor on, so people build the fix by hand. It always breaks the same way. February 2018, same subreddit: "My friends and I had a shared google calendar that we entered all our plans into but that kind of fell apart." That one needs feeding, forever. One quiet month kills it, and nobody notices until somebody has already flown home. An r/AppIdeas thread from June 2018 has the complaint from the other side: "Just random found out from an Instagram post but would have been cool to know ahead of time."

The fair objection is on r/digitalnomad too, August 2025: "Why do you feel the need to do it? It's a lot of mental work." That person is right about maintained systems. Spreadsheets are work. A calendar everybody has to keep current is work that friend groups abandon inside a month, going by how these threads end. What survives is the version nobody has to feed, where you enter a trip once when you book it and nothing happens again until two sets of dates collide.

Meetup and Nomads.com answer the other question

Both get recommended on nomad lists, both point at strangers, and that is fine as long as you know it going in. Meetup runs on whoever volunteers to organise, so coverage tracks the organisers rather than the size of the city, and its 3.9 stars from 235,000 Play reviews is the lowest rating of anything in this table. Meetup+ appears in the App Store as $4.99 and $9.99 in-app purchases. The company's own page describing that tier has not been touched since June 2024 and still calls the price "a small fee" without naming it. Trust the App Store strings.

Nomads.com (formerly Nomad List) publishes cost of living and rankings for 1,500-plus cities, and said about 45,000 members on the day I looked. Two prices sit on the homepage, $1 and $19.99, and which tier maps to which is not legible from the page. Check before you pay. Its members' Telegram chat will tell you who is in Lisbon this month, though never that your friend from Kyiv lands there on Thursday.

The category the lists skip

About a dozen apps do trip overlap, and no expat or nomad roundup I can find names one of them. Pangea is the funded one. Its own description says it lets you see "who's nearby, who's visiting your city, and where your trips overlap so you never miss the chance to meet in real life." Free with no in-app purchases, 4.9 from 74 ratings, v0.8.23 shipped on 10 August 2026, and on both phones, since the Play build (com.pangeatech.pangea) was updated on 5 August 2026.

Overlap is gone. Reddit used to recommend it, once in a 2024 r/digitalnomad thread and once in an r/AppIdeas thread from 2023. Pangea bought the company on 24 November 2025, and Apple's lookup for the old listing, id 1617541108, returned zero results when I ran it on 6 September 2026. Where those accounts went is a post of its own, and for the whole field rather than the survivors I keep an inventory of the category with each app's status.

Where the app I built fits

I built this one, so read the rest with that in mind. You add a trip as a city and two dates, your friends do the same, and when two trips land within 100 km of each other on overlapping dates both of you get a push notification. Miss each other by a few days, up to about a week, and it flags the near miss so somebody can move a day. A friend's home city counts as a destination match too, but only when they will be home rather than away on a trip of their own.

It never receives your live location. There is no GPS in it at all, so a trip reaches the server as a city name and two dates and nothing else, which means it cannot show a friend where you are standing. Friends who refuse another app get a group link. It drops up to 200 people into one group with no friend requests, and I wrote up what actually works there because "just download it" does not. iPhone and Android, 17 languages, free, no ads and no in-app purchases. Data sits in Ireland, crash reports in Frankfurt, and the exact list of what gets stored is on the privacy page.

It will not introduce you to strangers. It does not plan the trip, split the bill, or store your bookings, and it cannot replace Find My or Life360 for anyone who wants a live dot on a map, which I have no plan to change. Friends see the overlap only, meaning the matching city and those dates, never the rest of your trip list.

The other half of the app has nothing to do with friends. For each trip it pulls concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of where you are staying and inside your dates, from over 200,000 upcoming events across 57 countries and more than 360 hand-picked sources, tourist boards and city open-data portals mostly. Coverage is uneven. A few capitals are dense and plenty of mid-size cities come back nearly empty, which is a sourcing problem I chip away at a country at a time.

The cheapest test costs one screen. Add your home city and your next trip on the App Store or Google Play build, send the group link to the five friends who travel most, and see what fires in a month. If nothing fires, you have learned something about your friends' travel habits for free. The site is willubethere.app, and the longer version of the method, including the do-it-yourself stacks people keep trying before they give up, is in this walkthrough.