A mate of mine moved over to Balmain last year and texted me in his second week asking which app he needed for the boats. I sent him four of them and then spent the rest of the afternoon explaining why. That's the honest shape of the best Sydney ferry app question in 2026, because no single one of them covers the whole job and which one you want depends entirely on the bit of your morning you're trying to fix. Timetables aren't the interesting part either. They've all got the timetable sorted. It's the alerting, which is the thing the app store listing never spells out.
Here's why that matters more on the water than it does on the rails. Miss a train at Town Hall in the morning and there's another one along before you've finished being annoyed about it. Miss your ferry and you get to watch the one you wanted get smaller and then keep watching an empty stretch of harbour for a good while after that. So “I'll check the app before I leave” is a worse plan than it sounds. The delay that catches you is always the one that lands after you've closed the app and picked up your keys.
So here's every ferry app I use, what it's great at, then what it will and won't tell you when your boat runs late.
The quick answer: which app for which job
- Best offline timetable: TripView. Still the fastest way to see what's leaving.
- Best live map: AnyTrip. Watching your vessel cross the harbour is lovely.
- Best for your Opal card and the big disruptions: Opal Travel.
- Best for a trip you've never done before: Google Maps.
- Most authoritative when something's gone properly wrong: the official Transport for NSW trip planner.
- Best at speaking first when your boat runs late: not one of them, straight out of the box. That gap is the whole reason this post exists!
TripView: the timetable everyone already has
The thing TripView still does better than anything else here is answer you with no signal at all. The whole timetable lives on the phone rather than on a server, so it comes straight back whether you're in a stairwell or halfway across to Manly. Saved trips put your wharf one tap in and the live ferry departures are quick and reliable on top of that. It's what I open when the only question in my head is what's leaving!
Will TripView tell you your ferry is running late?
Only once you open it. The delay is sitting right there the second you look and nothing in the free app is going to reach out to you about it. Alarms belong to the paid version and each one hangs off a trip you picked in advance, one at a time, so an alarm is never any better than the guess you made when you set it. Handy for one specific boat on one specific Friday. No use at all on an ordinary Tuesday where you don't yet know which sailing you'll end up on. People who go looking for a TripView alternative are nearly always after that second thing.
Opal Travel: your card first, disruptions second
Opal Travel is really the card app and it's good at being the card app. Your balance, your top ups and your travel history all live there, so it earns a spot on the home screen whatever else you run. You can also save favourite trips and switch on disruption notifications for them, which genuinely does push a message to your phone when the operator declares something significant.
Watch what it actually sends you over a month though. Route suspensions and wharf closures. That's very close to the lot of it. The threshold belongs to whoever is deciding the network has a problem. One boat running five minutes behind has never been a network problem. So on the ordinary evenings, which are nearly all of them, it has nothing to say to you at all. I've been through every official channel and where each one stops in my guide to Sydney ferry delay notifications if you want the full picture.
AnyTrip: the nicest live map on the harbour
AnyTrip is the one I show people. You get a live map with the actual vessels moving on it, so you can watch your ferry come across from Manly instead of trusting a number on a board. It'll usually name the boat as well, which on the F1 is the one place a phone can tell you whether a Freshwater is on its way over before you're standing at the gate. If which boat you get is the part you care about, I've written up the difference between the Freshwater and Emerald boats on the F1. On a messy afternoon when the timetable has stopped meaning much it's also the quickest way to work out what's really happening out there.
For alerting though it's a watch-it-yourself tool. There's a paid tier in AnyTrip Plus and it buys you depth rather than a nudge before your boat, so either way the app waits for you to come to it. Brilliant for the ten minutes you're already looking. No help at all for the ten minutes you're not. Worth a look at the current listing before you pay, because the app has been moving towards alerts and that could change.
Google Maps: best for the trip you've never done
Nobody installs Google Maps as a ferry app and it still does a job the local ones do not. If your trip is a walk, then a boat, then a bus at the far end, Maps plans the whole thing better than anything else here. It'll surface a ferry delay too, at the moment you're looking at the route.
Alerting is the wobbly bit. Google can send updates about a commute you've saved, though how well that lands depends a lot on your phone. It's been noticeably stronger on Android than iPhone for years. Either way it's built around journeys you plan rather than the crossing you make every weekday, so I would not lean on it as your delay alarm.
The official Transport for NSW trip planner: the source of truth
The trip planner at transportnsw.info and the official app that goes with it are what everything else is downstream of. Live departures, real-time journey planning and the service alerts all come straight from the operator, so when something has gone properly wrong this is the version I trust. It's also where the planned stuff shows up first, like your wharf closing for maintenance over a weekend.
None of it is personal though. The alerts are written for a route or for the whole network, not for your departure, so you are still the one who has to go and read them. Transport for NSW will email you ahead of planned changes if you sign up, which is worth doing. Day to day though, nothing in there knows which departure is yours.
Which app tells me which wharf my ferry leaves from?
All of them do, in the sense that the wharf number rides along on the departure line once a service is live. What none of them will do is warn you when your route has moved off the gate you're used to. Circular Quay hands the same route different wharves at different times of day, so the app is right and your memory is wrong and you find that out at the wrong end of a long promenade. Reading the number off the screen every single time is the habit that fixes it. I went and pulled a week of live departures to map where each route actually berths, which is the Circular Quay wharf guide.
So what should you actually run?
For most of us it's two things, not one. Keep whichever timetable app you already like, because you'll want it for the unfamiliar trips. TripView if you like it fast and offline, AnyTrip if you like watching the harbour, Google Maps if your trip has legs either side of the water. Then hand the crossing you make every week to something willing to speak first, which is the gap I ended up building a free alert before every ferry inside the window you travel in to fill. These apps are all good at what they were built for. They just were not built to interrupt your morning.
One practical tip to finish and it's a ferry-only one. Keep half an eye on the water before a big southerly, because rough conditions can put a route onto a changed timetable or hand the whole thing over to buses. No app and no alert can tell you about a boat that was never going to run, so ten seconds on the official alerts the night before saves you the walk down. Which routes drop first has a shape to it once somebody points it out and it's all in the piece on Sydney ferry cancellations.
And whichever app you settle on, open it while you're still on wifi so the timetable is already sitting on the phone. The middle of the harbour is one of the few places left in this city where your signal quietly gives up. Working out on a moving boat whether the bus at the far end still exists is a rough way to spend a crossing. Enjoy the ride home!