How to Build an App Like Uber: A Comprehensive Guide

Research the Market and Define Goals

Starting a taxi booking app development project requires thoroughly researching the target market. Finding the target market is similar to conducting background checks of an industry’s potential to plan the direction of your app.

It starts by picking a country, a city, or any location experiencing a transportation problem. Since each economy has different demands, it’s important to understand how people generally commute.

This would help define your goals for analyzing market conditions.

For example, if a city has a thriving customer base for on-demand bike apps, there might be better options than opening a cab service. Similarly, if the traffic conditions in a city are normal, even during rush hours, a taxi-sharing business might have more potential.

Identify Your Unique Offering

The next step is to select a business model and identify your unique offering to customers. This requires building user personas and probable scenarios and preparing value propositions.

Based on the niche you offer, you have the following alternatives to choosing a business model;

• Taxi app for short distances
• App only outstation trips
• App for tourists
• Taxi booking from airports and hotels
• Self-drive taxis

Creating user stories is also an integral step that enables you to estimate time and app development costs by preparing a storyboard. Here are some questions to consider:

• Who are your existing customers, and who will be your new customer base?
• Are your customers willing to try the app, and what are their expectations?
• How many competitors are there in your market, and how does your unique offering set you apart?

Choose a Development Team

Before you start taxi app development, you should be aware that the methods and resources you choose will ultimately impact the cost, quality, timeline, and success.

While you can also choose no-code/low-code development and build an app with tools, you should be clear on when to choose it over traditional development.

For example, if your budget is higher and the app requires complex functions, we recommend choosing a development team. They can help you prepare app documentation that includes defining all the technical specifications.

Since new technologies like integrating AI and ML algorithms for real-time tracking have emerged, an efficient and user-friendly interface is essential. Low-code tools cannot offer the flexibility to modify elements.

In contrast, hiring a dedicated developers team can allow you to incorporate better security features, integrating payment gateways, tracking interfaces, and even fraud detection systems.

Develop an MVP With Basic Features

Partnering with an app development company enables you to understand the importance of developing an MVP before launching a full-fledged product.

While you can create a verified and approved list of the most basic features that you want to add, the business analysts and designers can help you build a tried and tested process to maximize your ROI right from the initial phases.

An MVP enables you to test the waters before going into production by deciding the core feature on which the app will rely. Here’s how you can determine the priority of a feature:

• Decide its complexity
• Find its relevance
• Identify the time when it is best to implement it
• Calculate the estimated expense towards it

We recommend starting with a customer-facing app before developing a driver’s app and admin panel.

Implement Advanced Features

Once you have built an MVP and marketed your product enough to keep increasing your customer base, you can start adding advanced features to keep customers engaged. The development team can move forward from here and introduce a cycle of operations that is divided into smaller tasks.

The back-end and front-end of an app require the most responsiveness to handle all user requests smoothly. Hence, a development team can help you build a powerful database storage, server-side architecture, and an interface to implement more advanced features.

Lastly, it’s important to test the app in live environments and different devices to check how each feature is performing.

Features Required for Drivers App

• Trip Alerts for Drivers: Alerts are sent to the drivers, informing them of incoming rides, destination information, pickup location, route, and rider details.
• Navigation: Navigation is for the driver to keep track of the traffic ahead and take shorter routes to the destination with Google Maps.
• Driver Reports: It provides detailed insights into daily/weekly/monthly earning reports on a driver’s rides, which fares, incentives, and earnings can also break down.
• Driver Profile: It provides complete information about the driver, including ID verification, license, insurance, and availability status.
• In-app CommunicationThis feature allows direct communication between the driver and rider through in-app calling and chatting without revealing your phone number.
• Active/inactive Drivers: The feature displays the drivers who are active and who are taking ride requests and the drivers who are inactive at the moment.
• Ride Accept/Reject/Cancel: The feature allows the drivers to accept or reject a trip request based on their availability or location.
• Trip Details and Estimated Fare: The feature displays rider details, pick-up and drop-off locations, and route information based on distance. The estimated fare is also based on distance, time, and surge pricing.
• Waiting Time: This feature displays whether the rider will be charged extra when the driver arrives at the pickup location and the waiting time exceeds 5 minutes.

Features Required for Passengers App

• Rider Registration: The feature of the passenger app allows riders to register on the app with their account using their email, phone number, or social media.
• Ride Booking: This feature enables riders to book a ride by selecting their preferred pickup and drop location and the type of vehicle they want.
• Calculate Fare: This feature allows riders to check the app’s estimated fare before starting the ride. As they select a type of ride, all nearby drivers are sent a request, and a driver is assigned.
• Track Rde/Driver: An essential feature of the passenger app, ride tracking, enables riders to monitor the location, car route, and ETA when the driver will be at the pick-up location. They can also track the ride while on the move to check if the correct route is being followed.
• Cancel Ride: After booking the ride, the rider has the option to cancel it if the driver takes too long to reach the pick-up location. However, they must do so within a specified time to avoid a cancellation fee.
• Trip History: This feature is for keeping track of previous rides and transactions done by the rider.
• Ratings and Reviews: Riders can leave ratings and reviews for each ride and driver with whom they have booked a ride and give their feedback.
• In-app Messaging and Calling: Riders can stay in contact with the driver through in-app calling and text messaging to stay updated when the driver has arrived at the pickup location or if there’s any delay.

Admin Panel for Taxi Booking Apps Like Uber

• User and Driver Management: It allows admins to manage user and driver profiles, view trip records, and modify user information regarding driver verification and performance.
• Booking and Ride Management: This feature provides admins with insights into managing ride details and requests, real-time tracking of ride processes, and calculating estimated fares.
• Location and Fare Management: This feature manages each detail related to the location of riders and drivers, routes, navigation, and fares according to the current traffic and weather conditions.
• Reviews Management: The admins can manage reviews, feedback, and ratings received from drivers to riders and vice versa and resolve any issues arising from them.
• Customer Support: Customer support is an essential feature that addresses any queries regarding drivers and riders and manages them from a single point of contact.
• Payment Management: The feature allows administrators to manage payment methods and multiple modes of payment, track ride payments and transactions, commissions, discounts, promotions, and cancellations, and address any related issues.

Advanced Features and Requirements

• Heat Maps: Heat maps allow drivers to view the areas through the geolocation API where the ride requests are in high demand and switch to that location to increase their profits.
• Split Fare: The split fare feature enables riders to split the fare among fellow riders who are traveling in a rideshare or carpool.
• Language Support: Support for multiple languages allows drivers and riders to choose their preferred language when traveling in a different city.
• SOS Button: The emergency button is a security feature that can help passengers tap it when they sense any danger. The app can also have an alert when the ride is not moving for a while and is at a halt.
• Driver tipping: This feature is a bonus to thank drivers by paying an extra amount for their service.
• Schedule a Ride in Advance: Users can schedule a ride before the actual time they want to travel in situations where they have important commitments, an early flight, etc., to save time.
• Book a Ride for Others: Users can book a ride for their friends and family from another location. A feature of adding multiple seats can also be added.

Geolocation

Google Maps integration works best to track vehicle movement in real-time, allowing drivers to follow GPS directions. Maps SDK and Geolocation API are a must for an app like Uber for Android to fetch price location data.

Similarly, iOS apps like Uber, CoreLocation, and MapKit frameworks are the recommended tech stack for selecting routes and directions.

Routing and Service Discovery

Uber uses a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) to make routing and service discovery crucial. It uses a combination of HAProxy and Hyperbahn to send JSON and HTTP requests to other services. The front end uses an NGINX web server to establish proxying with back-end servers.

Mapping

Uber’s mapping services run on a Java-based framework for collecting address information, implementing algorithms, displaying, and routing. The framework powering the front end is Gurafu, which works with road map data to improve accuracy and provide sophisticated routing options. This is important for the correct analysis of the ETAs.

The latency of ETA requests is an order every 5 milliseconds. To allocate memory, parallelize computations, and keep making requests, another framework called DropWizard is used to add a layer of business logic over the raw ETAs. Map services include three engines for the backend – autocomplete, predictions, and geocoding for search boxes.

App Logging and Provisioning

Interactions between services and mobile devices for internal uses, such as debugging, are important to run dynamic pricing operations. Uber uses Kafka clusters and archives data in Hadoop.

Uber uses the ELK stack, a combination of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, for real-time data ingestion and indexing. To run microservices with consistent configurations, it uses Docker containers on Mesos along with Aurora. 

Infrastructure and Storage

Building an app like Uber may require a hybrid cloud infrastructure with a mix of data centers active at multiple locations. In a business model like Uber, cities are assigned to the geographically closest data centers, with their backup stored in a different location on another data center.

Initially, Uber used Postgres for storage, but Schemaless and Cassandra have now replaced it to improve speed and performance. Additionally, the engineers use the Hadoop warehouse for distributed storage. Lastly, Redis and Twemproxy are used for caching and queueing without compromising the hit rate.

Data and Metrics Tracking

Uber developed M3 in Go to collect and store metrics and search for trends. It displays information using modified graphs and dashboards in Grafana. Uber also developed its in-house tool, Argos, for detecting anomalies, examining incoming metrics, and comparing them to predictive models.