nextbike by TIER

nextbike by TIER

About this app

Find your bike, get on it, and start cycling immediately - around the clock, with your smartphone! All you need is the nextbike by TIER app. It simplifies rentals, returns, and always shows you bikes near you.

To rent, simply select the bike, scan the QR code or enter the bike number - and off you go! You can return your bike at one of our stations or in the flexzone. The map function in the app helps you to find the right return location. With our app you have everything at a glance: manage your customer account, redeem vouchers, discover news, give feedback or contact our customer service.

The app can be used for all nextbike brands. Once registered, you can also ride in other brands. From now on, TIER vehicles will also be displayed in selected cities on the nextbike by TIER app. You can rent these vehicles via a deep link in the TIER app.

Once you register in your favorite city, you can ride a bike in all the other cities, too like e.g. Styr & Ställ in Gothenburg, City Bike Linz, or Arriva bike.

Ratings and reviews

I love the idea and like how it can be combined with e.g. Multisport card. The experience, however, is pretty bad. When unlocking the bike, there's about 40% chance that it doesn't unlock. Moving the bike, as suggested by support, doesn't help. If that happens, you can't just stop the rental, you have to fill a bug report and hope that the support stops the rental for you. Sorry, literally 50% of my time in the app is spent on bug reports :(

I like the fact that you can connect it with your local transportation subscription and can use it without any additional costs. But the user experience is just frustrating. Always heading to bikes that appeared on the map as available, but in reality are not findable or just not unlockable. Which leads to running from spot to spot, finding no bike at all and head back home for taking the own bike in the end anyways, losing half an hour when being late already.. Then they charge you 20 euros for parking the bike in an unallowed area, without giving any notification or hint that it is the case. On the positive side they have friendly customer support which is available everytime I needed to call it. And I needed to call it quite often, because the bikes doesn't lock and return correctly or something is broken. I remember it was worse some years ago, but I wish their would be better availability or at least a correct overview of the available bikes in the app, to save up the frustration when running for a bike which is not usable or just not findable. As they are part of tier now, tier can also do better.

Edit: knocked down to one star. Even when the app works, there are no bikes. Utterly useless. The app is unreliable at recording end locations. Even when I have returned bikes to official stations and checked that my phone has an accurate location fix I still get "we cannot find your bike" notifications. The bikes also have issues (broken lights, broken gears, broken saddles) about 50% of the time. Not great. I'd love it if it all worked, but it just doesn't really.