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Almost certainly one of four apps. None of them is exotic. All of them are free for the kind of casual day-to-day use you are describing, and any of them can do exactly what you saw your friend do. Which one she had open is a guess from where I am sitting, but it is a short list.

How I'd approach it

Google Translate is the obvious candidate. It has been the default for years, and in 2026 it is still the most-installed translation app in the world. It does three things that match what you saw. The conversation mode lets two people speak in different languages and the phone translates between them in near real time. The camera mode points at a sign or a menu and overlays English on top. And the voice button just translates a single phrase. If your friend had a green and white app icon, it was Google Translate.

If she had an iPhone, it might have been the built-in Apple Translate app. It comes with the phone, works offline once you have downloaded a language pack, and has the same conversation mode as Google. It is less well known than Google Translate but it is genuinely good now, and on an iPhone it is one tap away in the Action Button or the Siri menu.

The newer option is ChatGPT or Gemini in voice mode. If your friend's app was the one with the moving voice waveform on a black or grey screen, it was probably one of these. You hand the phone to a chatbot in voice mode and say "I am going to talk to my friend in Mandarin and you translate everything she says into English, then translate my reply back". It will. Of the three big chatbots, ChatGPT's voice mode currently feels the most like a real human interpreter sitting between you, with proper pauses and tone. The free tier is fine for short conversations.

If she has a recent Samsung Galaxy, the phone itself may have done it. Galaxy AI's Live Translate runs inside the phone call app and the keyboard. There is no separate app, it just appears as an option on the call screen. Pixel phones have a similar feature called Interpreter mode in the Google app.

For most people in 2026, my advice is: install Google Translate as a baseline (every phone, every country, works offline if you download the language pack ahead of time), and if you already pay for ChatGPT or Gemini, learn the voice mode trick because it handles longer back-and-forth conversations more naturally than the older translation apps.

What I'd avoid

Two honest catches. None of these apps is perfect on accents. Strong regional accents, fast mumbling, or two people talking over each other will trip them up, and the translation will quietly drop a sentence or invent something plausible rather than say "I did not catch that". For chitchat over coffee that is fine. For anything that matters (medical, legal, signing a document), have a real human interpreter present. The other catch is privacy. Free chatbot voice mode and Google's cloud apps send the audio to a server to translate. If the conversation is sensitive, either use the offline mode in Google or Apple Translate, or wait until you can speak privately.