We created a seamless mobile experience that brings real-time tracking, journey planning and ticketing to London’s iconic River Bus network.
A single app designed to give passengers clarity, control and confidence at every stage of their journey.
Uber Boat by Thames Clippers (UBTC) carries millions of commuter and leisure journeys each year, but its digital experience was a generic third-party ticketing app with no journey planning, no live vessel data and no behavioural insight.
River travel can feel unpredictable because its data is invisible. Unlike rail or road, boats run without fixed lanes, telemetry is irregular and conditions change by the hour. Commuters needed speed and reliability, while tourists needed discovery and reassurance.
Following the successful delivery of the online journey planner, Brandwidth was asked to take the experience further by designing and building a new native iOS and Android app. The goal was to bring journey planning, ticketing, real-time tracking and discovery together in one intuitive experience.
We rebuilt the experience as a fully native iOS and Android mobility platform, unifying four jobs in one flow: plan, track, pay and explore.
At its centre is “Where’s My Clipper?”, which visualises live boat location, direction and capacity. A pier-to-pier journey planner, live schedules, Apple Pay and Google Pay ticketing and a curated River Guide complete the experience. From the home screen, users can plan a route, see the next boat live, buy a ticket and discover a landmark in a handful of taps.
Behind the experience sits a unified processing pipeline that brings together timetables, vessel telemetry, river conditions and geolocation into one reliable real-time stream. We also integrated Thames Clippers’ dedicated marine GPS feed directly into the app, providing stable, low-latency tracking on the water.
This gives passengers a clear, dependable view of the river network, helping commuters plan around live services with greater confidence while giving tourists an easier way to explore the Thames.
For sightseers and casual explorers, we integrated UBTC’s River Guide into the app. It brings curated routes, landmarks and riverside highlights into the experience, turning a commute into sightseeing.
River Guide sessions are significantly more engaged than average, showing how the app serves tourists as well as commuters.
The commercial result was immediate and sustained. Over the last 12 months, app-generated ticket revenue increased 54% year on year, demonstrating continued growth following the app’s launch.
Download growth has also continued well beyond launch. H1 2026 downloads increased 82.4% year on year, showing that adoption has been sustained rather than being a one-off spike. In the launch month alone, downloads were up 92% year on year.
The two core features that didn’t exist before the relaunch are continuing to gain pace too. Live tracking has reached 45,000 boats tracked per month, up 150% compared with January 2026. Journey planning has increased 123% over the same period.
Together, live tracking and journey planning now account for around 18% of all in-app activity, demonstrating how passengers have adopted features that simply didn’t exist before the relaunch.
More than a redesign, the app has turned a ticket-only utility into London’s first operationally accurate, real-time river app. By making complex operational data clear at the moment passengers need it, the experience gives commuters greater confidence, helps tourists discover the Thames and demonstrates how a refined digital experience can directly grow a business.
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