Which Apps Actually Help When You Don't Know Anyone in Town

Moving somewhere new deletes your social infrastructure overnight. Not gradually, the way it happens when people drift apart over years. All at once. The people you used to run into, the colleague you’d grab lunch with, the neighbour who waved — gone, replaced by a city that has no idea you exist.

This is not a motivation problem. It’s a supply problem. There is no network to lean on because there is no network. The OECD’s 2025 report on social connections across member countries notes that people are meeting in person less often than they used to, across the board, which means a new arrival isn’t just missing their old contacts — they’re arriving into a general climate where in-person contact is already thinner than it was.

So: apps. Three that approach the problem differently, and what each one is actually good for.

Meetup, or: the interest-first route

Meetup has been running since 2002 and is reportedly used by around 60 million people. The model is straightforward. You join a group organised around something specific — a hiking group, a board game night, a beginner French class — and you show up to its scheduled events. It’s free to join and browse, with unlimited groups.

The advantage for someone new to a place is that it sidesteps the hardest part of making friends: having a reason to be in the same room as someone more than once. A group has a recurring event. You don’t have to invent an excuse to see the same people again — the calendar does it for you. That matters more than it sounds like it should. Robert Putnam’s research on American civic life found that the informal, repeated gatherings that used to hold communities together — bowling leagues, club meetings, church groups — had been declining for decades, and it’s exactly that kind of low-stakes recurrence that’s hardest to manufacture on your own.

The downside is quality control. Meetup groups vary wildly in how active and welcoming they actually are. Some are thriving; others are a defunct page with an organiser who stopped showing up eighteen months ago. You’ll need to try two or three before one sticks, and the first visit to any of them is going to feel exactly as awkward as walking into a room of strangers always feels.

Timeleft, or: the dinner-table route

Timeleft takes a narrower approach: it seats you at a weekly dinner with five strangers matched by a personality questionnaire, at a set restaurant, on a set night. There’s no messaging beforehand — you just show up. The company says it has seated more than three million guests since launching in 2020, and it won a Google Play “Best Hidden Gem” award in 2024.

For someone new to a city, the appeal is that it removes every point of friction at once. You don’t choose the venue, you don’t have to find the group, you don’t have to make conversation happen from nothing because the format — a dinner, with strangers who also opted in — does that work for you. It’s a single evening, not a recurring commitment, which is lower-stakes than joining a group you might not like.

The trade-off is exactly that: it’s one dinner. There’s no built-in reason to see the same five people again unless everyone independently decides they liked each other and exchanges numbers, which sometimes happens and sometimes doesn’t. If what you need is a friend, not an evening, Timeleft is a good way to practise the interaction, not a guarantee of a repeat one.

Buffet, or: the one-to-one route

Buffet, which launched in Los Angeles and was covered by TechCrunch in April 2024, works differently again. You enter five interests and answer a short personality questionnaire, and an algorithm matches you with one other person and a venue to meet at. It’s a freemium app — one match, one person, one place, more like a friendship-oriented dating app than a group event.

That format suits a specific situation: you want to meet people, but a table of six strangers sounds like more social effort than you have in you right now. One person is a much smaller ask. It’s also the format most likely to produce something that feels like an actual friendship, because the whole point is a real conversation with one person rather than a diffuse evening with several.

Its limitation is the flip side of that. One match a week, at best, means the pace of new contact is slow. If you’ve just moved and you’re trying to build several ongoing relationships fast, a one-to-one app on its own won’t get you there quickly. It works better as one thread among several than as the whole plan.

What actually fixes the problem

None of these apps solves the real thing that’s missing, which is repetition. A single Timeleft dinner, a single Buffet match, a single Meetup event — each is a start, not an answer. The apps that get you furthest are the ones that put you in front of the same small set of people more than once, because that’s what turns a stranger into someone you’d text.

Practically: pick the option that matches how much social energy you actually have this month, not the one that sounds most efficient on paper. If a big room of strangers sounds exhausting, don’t force yourself into a Meetup event as a character-building exercise — try the one-to-one route first. If you’d rather have a single evening with a defined end point than an ongoing group commitment, a dinner format is the lower-friction choice. Then, whichever you pick, go back. The second visit is the one that starts to count.