I was just getting more and more frustrated with Easy Wallet today since it had logged me out and all the instructions to get back in were in Chinese and I had to wait for my GF to come back to help me.
What we really really need here are two basic apps in English
a) One that tells you how much you have on your Easy Card and optionally allows you to top it up
b) One that tell you how long you have to wait for busses at the bus stop you are at and can also direct you to the nearest bus top with a list of busses that go from there, wait times and where those busses go. I know there are a few Chinese apps that do this but I havenât found one simple enough I can use with my limited Chinese so I think an English one like this not being offered already by TPE City Govn is daft beyond belief - unless there is one but I just havenât found it yet?
Anyone else think of apps we really could do with in English - The NHI one for booking appointments would be amazing too.
If one is going to be in a new country for many years, why not just learn the local language to a degree of competency?
Creating an English version of the site for a few tenthousand long-term folks is a lot of work for little reward in many companies/institutionsâ eyes.
As to creating a site, I didnât say that, I said an app would be useful.
There is that website, but itâs not very useful unless you are sitting at a computer.
As to learning the local language, well to use an app you need to learn to read it too which is a whole level of magnitude harder. I know of a number of people who have had 100s of hrs of lessons, been here for 20+ yrs and still canât manage colours or buy any food other than what they normally get from the restaurant every time. A lot of the issues with the Chinese apps is the bloat, each app tries to do so much that navigating them is getting harder and harder. I used to use one of the taxi apps to call taxis but it seemed almost every month there was a new version and they moved the icons around getting to the point I had to relearn the app over and over again. I gave up in the end.
As I said before what would be very useful is simple no frills apps - to develop these should be simple because most of the hard work has already happened in the Chinese apps. Take the 2-3 useful functions from those, drop the rest of the âfeaturesâ and swap what is left to English and its done.
The easy card app is set and forget. Once youâve added your card using the Chinese interface, you donât need to interact with anything Chinese to know your balance. Just use google translate to add your card and then youâre golden. For the bus tracker, there are many English apps, theyâre shit, but theyâre shit in Chinese too.
Not quite, the issue today was it âlogged me outâ and I couldnât understand enough to fill in the âformsâ to get back in again. As to not needing to interact with it - thatâs also not quite right, you need to be able to navigate the interface to find the right âpageâ to get the card value. Again if this doesnât work 1st time because youâve been âlogged outâ then its a real hassle because if you donât realise what has happened then you spend ages trying all the other âpagesâ unless you can find someone to help you.
An English version would have saved me lots of time today on the above.
Thereâs your first problem. You donât need to login to see your card balance. Add the card independently of your account. You donât need an account
Iâve come to appreciate the convenience of using my Apple Watch for all of my monetary transactions (Apple Pay linked to my debit card), and have stopped using EasyCards and iPass Cards all together. No need to carry a wallet. Most places that accept EasyCards or iPass Cards have credit card readers with Apple Pay, even the MRT.
Although some smaller street-side shops only accept mobile payment via QR code, for which I have an iPass Money account. Itâs within the Line app (which you probably already have) and itâs in English.
Make me the second. I am in and out while xiaojie over there fumbles with her phone to get to the right app and then spend 30 seconds getting the scanner to scan the bloody thing.
You still need to pull cash out of your wallet, donât you? And once you hand it to the cashier, you still need to wait for them to open the register, put away your cash, take out your change, count your change, and hand you the change, right?
And then comes the worst part: The coins are on top of the bills they just handed you. What are you going to do? Dump everything into the same compartment in your wallet? Nay. You need to first pick out the coins and put them into the coin purse, and then slide the bills into the main compartment. Not to mention your wallet only holds a limited amount of coins, so you canât keep them in there forever. Youâll sometimes need to pay with coins to be able to get rid of them, so you also need to add the time it takes you to count coins.
Surely this canât be more convenient than scanning a phone or an Apple Watch.
