If you’re that person who’s always asking for a ride or help moving, or you’re just too crazy busy to go grocery shopping or clean your own house, there’s a range of apps that could make your life a whole lot easier. Moving beyond the usual suspects like Uber and Amazon Prime Now, these city-centric apps streamline urban lifestyles, giving you assistance with things like transit planning, sharing rides, choosing a place to live, hiring people to assemble your IKEA furniture or getting liquor delivered to your doorstep.

Via Ride-Sharing App

Based in New York City, Via is a cab alternative in the vein of Lyft and Uber, but offers ride sharing, so you get into a car full of multiple passengers and pay less. The service charges a flat $5 fee for each of the first five rides and $7 thereafter (or still $5, if you buy the rides in advance.) Passengers are asked to meet their drivers on a street corner instead of being picked up at a specific location, and if you’re late, you have to wait for the next vehicle. It may not be the fastest way to get somewhere if you’re in a hurry, but it’s a cool alternative to city buses for everyday rides.

Urban Engines App

Which public transit route should you take at rush hour to avoid slowdowns? How did last night’s storm affect light rail service? Depending on what’s going on in the world, the flow of traffic changes. The Urban Engines app takes a variety of data points in big cities like Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Toronto and Los Angeles and uses them to determine which routes are best at which times. Best of all, it has an X-ray mode function that superimposes maps, bus or train routes and stops over the city as viewed through the camera lens of your phone, so you can easily find stops around you. It also continues working when there’s no mobile service as long as it has the right maps downloaded, so it won’t cut out underground.

Instacart App

Get groceries delivered from local stores (maybe even ones that aren’t included with Amazon Prime Now’s similar app service) via Instacart. The whole process is surprisingly fast, partially due to the fact that Instacart typically reserves its own checkout aisle at each participating store, ushering its shoppers through the lines. It’s pretty ideal for those times when you just can’t be bothered to leave the house (like when you’re sick, suffering from a hangover, or just really busy.)

Drizly App

Who doesn’t want wine, beer and liquor delivered to their door on demand? Drizly is an alcohol delivery app partnered with liquor stores in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, D.C. and other cities, with a goal of building the biggest online catalog of booze available for delivery in the U.S.

Hello Alfred App

These days, you can even order housekeeping and butler services on demand. ‘Hello, Alfred’ is an app that connects you to ‘carefully vetted’ helpers who visit your home once a week according to your desired schedule, doing chores like cleaning, grocery shopping, picking up dry cleaning and shipping your packages.

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Whatever You Need On Demand 10 Apps That Streamline Urban Life

A crafty reading railroad, this conveyor system helps bring up books from a series of research stacks and storage spaces hidden beneath Bryant Park, making the volumes available via a system of miniature trains.

This particular branch of the New York Public Library in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building houses millions of volumes, many of which are stored below the ground but now accessible at speed thanks to this new layer of internal technology.

This book train system looks a bit like a tiny roller coaster and is used to transfer materials seamlessly, quickly and automatically along the vertical-and-horizontal track system, carrying requested books directly to places like the Rose Main Reading Room.

Each cart (of which there are 24) can hold 30 pounds of reading materials and can climb 11 stories within the building to service various floors.

A pivot joint between the book-carrying basket and the main body of the cart allows the former to remain upright without spilling its contents while the latter tilts up to 90 degrees, carrying books straight up between levels.

Thus far, the 21st century has been pretty disappointing for those of us who grew up expecting flying cars, teleportation devices and recreational trips to the moon by the time we were adults. While there were some things sci-fi films like Back to the Future got right – including video calls, flat-screen televisions, wearable technology and biometrics – nobody short of a billionaire villain type actually has a robotic butler that can bring them food at the push of a button. But if you live in London, you will soon be able to access the next best thing: dinner delivery via a six-wheeled droid.

Starship Technologies, which is run by two Skype co-founders, is partnering with London food delivery startups Just Eat and Pronto to send what essentially look like wheeled coolers through the streets, dropping off meals to customers within a 2-3 mile radius. Commercial tests will also be carried out in Dusseldorf, Germany, and in Starship’s home city of Tallinn, Estonia starting this month. This is on top of 5,000 miles of previous testing in places like Glastonbury, where the bots have “met over 400,000 people without a single accident,” but this is the first time they’ll be delivering food to actual paying customers. Starship is expected to announce rollouts in the U.S. in the coming months.

Is it really the next best thing to a robot butler, though? The first question that pops into many people’s heads when reading about this technology is whether somebody can just kick that self-driving droid around a little bit and steal your food for themselves. It’s a fair question. Starship says for these first test drives, the bots won’t be fully automatic – the company will monitor their progress remotely and take over if anything goes awry.

The zero-emissions delivery bots sense obstacles in their path and navigate around pedestrians, getting out of the way as necessary, as seen in the video above. Not just anyone can access what’s inside, either. The customer who ordered the food has to use an app on their phone to open it, ensuring that the robot doesn’t just roll up to somebody else who lives in your apartment building and give them your pad thai.

With all the focus on flying drones, grounded versions can fly under the radar, like the bot driving this latest business from the co-founders of Skype. Facilitating robotic deliveries in London, Starship Technologies aims to advance driverless automation in smaller steps, beating autonomous car companies to getting driver-free wheels on the ground in England.

The little driverless electric vehicles that will be making the rounds are six-wheeled rovers just over 20 inches tall and able to be packed with a sizable load of goods for short shipments.

Customers simply select items online, pick from delivery windows, then track progress on an app and tap on their logged-in device to open the lid when their shipment of stuff arrives.

Cruising at just four miles per hour, it remains to be seen how they will handle even sidewalk foot traffic, let alone road crossings. Its creators also presumably anticipate that a watchful public (and CCTV cameras) will help keep the little drones safe on their journeys. However, the bots can also directly relay distress signals to the police in an emergency or be remotely operated by human pilots as needed.

They also come with an antennae that both helps with wireless connectivity but also provides visibility beyond each drone’s natural height.

“Our vision revolves around three zeroes – zero cost, zero waiting time and zero environmental impact,” say the founders. “We want to do to local deliveries what Skype did to telecommunications.”

So far the robots have only been tested indoors (interoffice experiments), but the company aims to hit the streets (or at least sidewalks) next year.

It is in many ways an attempt to solve the ever-vexing ‘last mile’ problem: “The last few miles often amounts to the majority of the total delivery cost.”

“Our robots are purposely designed using the technologies made affordable by mobile phones and tablets – it’s fit for purpose, and allows for the cost savings to be passed on to the customer.”

Google sees Amazon’s Prime Air drone delivery service and raises it with the enhanced aesthetics of its own Project Wing, a series of autonomous aerial vehicles currently being tested. In development for the past two years and a secret until this week, Project Wing was initially conceived as a way to deliver emergency aid like defibrillator kits to people in remote places or disaster areas.

Now that the prototype vehicles have been tested (in Australia, which is far more lax about the use of drones than the United States,) it seems that they could be used to deliver goods to customers in a similar way to Amazon Prime Air, as well.

“As part of our research, we built a vehicle and traveled to Queensland, Australia for some test flights,” says Google of the project. “There, we successfully delivered a first aid kit, candy bars, dog treats, and water to a couple of Australian farmers.”

Developed by the company’s research arm, Google X, the Project Wing drones have a wingspan of about 4.9 feet and a total weight capacity of 22 pounds, the bulk of which is taken up by the drone itself at 18.7 pounds. It doesn’t need a runway to take off or land, and can hold its position hovering in one spot.

Looking like tiny blunt airplanes, the drones are at least a visual improvement over Amazon’s design, which was mocked for resembling a flying barbecue grill.