Want To Make An App Like Uber and Lyft? 7 Things You Need To Consider

Updated On Apr 09, 2021

Trying to Make an App Like Uber and Lyft? 7 Things to Bother You!

Taxi apps like Uber and Lyft are just mushrooming everywhere. Almost every small to a big investor is trying to bathe their hands in the revenue stream of taxi apps. And why won’t they try to Build Uber Like App?

Since these taxi apps like Uber and Lyft have been a boon to people who want to avoid the hassles of heavy traffic and no refusals, just to be on time. So, taxi businesses are blindly appetizing themselves to deliver great customer services. But the real reason behind people to make an app like Uber is, moolahs!

But is it true – apps like Uber and Lyft are meant only to rake moolahs? Hope not. But some recent incidences are really proving a threat to the taxi app industry. There was a possible brewing in Ola a few months back, which was put out on Twitter.

The driver claimed that approximately 12,000 cab drivers used a software to dig up freebies offered by the company without serving any passengers. The fraud team made 30,000 INR/day!

Drivers and four riders, with 500 SIM cards and with one Ola registered the phone, all set to dupe customers. The app was showing a cab is near them, when in actuality it isn’t. Ola sensed something after seven months and blacklisted the cabs.

You don’t want something like this for your taxi brand, right?

If your aim is to develop a billion-dollar taxi app like Uber and Lyft or launch another Uber for X (Wanna know what it is? Hold on – I will talking about it soon), it is important to ensure that your cab app is secured and qualified for a bigger audience.

It’s the development of apps like Uber and Lyft that form the backbone of these transport apps. And for that, I will recommend you to talk to all types of taxi app development company before you start your own taxi business. In addition, you must know the cost to build apps like Uber and Lyft.

Tales Of Making An App Like Uber and Lyft – When It All Started?

In the year 2008, Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, two entrepreneurs from San Francisco, founded Uber. Now Uber has expanded to more than 35 countries and to more than 100 cities. But this great idea tends to be repeated and we started to have similar apps like Lyft, Hailo, Gett (they have the guts to mention that they “have better pay than Uber”), Easy Taxi, Didi Dache (taxi app based in China), homegrown Ola.

But do you think that these apps like Uber and Lyft model work for everyone? If every taxi app development company starts producing Uber clones, won’t this market become saturated soon with Uber app clone?

Related Read: Rise of a Unique Taxi App Solution – Story of Uber, A New Beginning

Taxi app platforms thus need to deliver a taxi business with a little twist to keep them ahead of the competition. Copying isn’t cool – so if you jump on the trend of Uber for X, think twice. Are you craving to develop an app like Uber and Lyft or something at par?

I’ll try to explain all of these which propelled a humongous growth of Uber, the ride-hailing behemoth! If you are in the process to make an app like Uber for your business, here are some important knick-knacks.

A. What Are Basics To Make An App Like Uber?

As you’re reading this post, I believe you already in a taxi business or trying to start up one. Whatever may be the case, smarter folks like you want to know how to develop apps like Uber and Lyft.

Well, the service is not just about ‘an app’- but 3 different products. Uber comes with a driver, passenger and owner’s admin dashboard.

Let’s take a quick glance at the features.

Passenger App Features

• Book a Ride
• Driver Profile & Detail
• Booking Alert (push notification)
• Navigation & Mapping
• Fare Estimation
• Rate Drivers

Driver App Features

• Booking Interface
• Register Page
• Ride History
• Payment Page
• Push Notification
• Fare Calculator
• Rating & Review

While these basic features work well during a taxi app development, but I’ve also been requested with additional features to make their taxi app like Uber or better than Uber. Recently we worked with a few taxi app development clients and they wanted features like “add favorite drivers”, “split the bill” and “choose female drivers”. It worked well for their type of businesses.

So customization of features is no longer a big deal today. Adding new options will just take a few sessions of brainstorming and Voila! – Your kind of Uber-like app will be ready.

B. Are You Giving Importance On How Your App Performs?

Developing Ridesharing apps like Uber and Lyft comes with bigger responsibilities. Think about it. If you’re choosing any random taxi app development solution firm, can you get the confidence that your app can handle wide traffic?

In a few months of time, your business will start receiving thousands of ride requests per day! (In case, if you’ve done an amazing marketing.) But, is your taxi booking app ready to take the pressure? Will your app perform like a rockstar?

After working with different ride apps, the one technology which I suggest all taxi booking software must have is AWS- Amazon Web Service.

It’s a technology that automatically distributes the incoming traffic across the target. Sound technical? Let me brief you!

Suppose you have a received 10,000 ride request at a moment. And your application is ready to take up the load and hence it works well. But what if the request increases to 50,000? Will your driver/passenger app and web server be able to take up the load without crashing?

Working with numerous apps like Uber and Lyft, what we understand at Innofied is that AWS works well to equalize the load. The system has an increased request handling capacity to aner the incoming traffic. It works on ELB- Elastic Load Balancer that distributes the load monitors targets and routes the incoming traffic to healthy targets in the server. With the use of a secure cloud platform, AWS offers computing power, efficient database storage, and related functionality to help your app grow. This service helps you to develop an app like Uber and your web admin to perform without bugging and crashing. And hence performance is top-notch. The price depends on what kind of load balancer you choose.

There’s always an option to customize the load using ELB. You don’t bear the cost extra apart from the AWS resources you need.

C. Geotagging Is In Craze – Have You Opted For It?

Uber like taxi app development relies on the geolocation and mapping features to identify the device’s location, providing driving directions and highlights route. Whatever may be the application of whether taxi app or restaurant app it must deal with maps.

Determining the current location is no doubt an important factor and you can accomplish this with CoreLocation Framework for your iOS apps. It allows us to define geographic areas, and monitor a device’s movements as it crosses specified boundaries. For Geolocation in the Android version, one can implement Google’s Location APIs in to make an app like Uber. In order to display point-to-point directions on a map, the developer uses MapKit and for Android, they use Google Maps Android API v2.

As for Maps, you might not put much stress and can integrate Google Maps for both iPhone and Android versions. Is the taxi app solution you are trying to confirm uses the following technologies such as maps, routes and geolocation targets? You need to heed this if you want to make an app like Uber.

Related read: What’s the Success Mantra Behind Developing Apps Like Uber and Lyft?

D. Which Payment Integration Is Appropriate To Make An App Like Uber?

Taxi apps main selling point is in-app payments, which simply obsolete the use of small bills, tokens, waiting for change and overcharges. It’s all sorted. One can easily get a pre-ride estimate and decide whether to take the ride or not in apps like Uber and Lyft. Even the dynamic pricing (discounts or add on fare) concept depending on the traffic and car availability are some of the overwhelming features that will give your competitors a sweat.

You can take notes of the features if you’re looking to build an app like Uber. Technologies used for payment integration:

• Stripe
• Apple Pay
• Google Wallet
• PayPal
• Braintree
• CCAvenue

So ask your taxi app developers if they are going to confirm you with this technology stack if you come to them.

E. Got a Bad Design? You are Going to Fail!

A bad design can fail your business, but simply copying and giving a facelift is seriously going to hurt in the long run!

You want a pretty looking app, don’t you?

When you’re developing an app like Uber, it must be simple, smooth, bug-free and interactive. User experience at its best. Think of how Uber played the game! How they won millions of hearts?

Well, the taxi app giant introduced psychological inducements to influence passengers and drove them to press the button. Uber wanted to make the app global and irreplaceable wherever it’s working. For this, Uber’s design team aimed to make the user experience consistent throughout the user base. The app is interactive, engages the audience with features like fast pick up, in-app call driver feature, an interactive GPS navigation helps to tell the position of the arriving car, etc. It basically reduces the anticipation of a passenger and the job is done. 

There’s no doubt that whoever came up to us to build an Uber clone app wanted a pretty and better-looking app than Uber or Lyft. Since they were walking on the path of Uber for X, so wanted to Uberify their app. Better to say they wanted all functions like Uber, just the look should be different. What will be the future of that taxi app?

What I wanted is an on-demand bike taxi app that must help the business develop a simple, intuitive and smooth app to convey all information in a few steps. And not an Uber clone.

I love to boast on the core principles of great UI/UX a little. They are none other than familiarity, consistency, efficiency, and flexibility. If your taxi booking app development confirms all the design principles, you are sure to set the taxi market on fire!

F. User Profiles, Registration, and Login Page – You Have Lot to Do There

All taxi app development companies must try to make an app like Uber that has an awesome backend. This makes user profiles, login page and registration does not appear like a mammoth task. So, if you hire taxi app developers, make sure they look after the proper functions before you develop an app like Uber.

You may allow “no-profile” bookings at an early stage to grow the database and ask/suggest the user create a profile when he or she finds a ride and wishes to finalize the payment.

To gain the confidence of the customers the taxi app development company must enable privacy features. Like, make sure that app requests access only essential user data and clearly states that it will never post anything on their behalf. Social media integration or Email Registration whatever you choose must abide by the rule of IPR (Intellectual Property Rights).

Whereas developing a driver’s app, the taxi app development company must ensure that they are strict enough on this aspect. The process should have a little more complicated registration process like an immediate request for photos, car license plate numbers, copy of the driver’s license.

Moreover, the presence of a rating system is a must. It leverages app security and boosts customer satisfaction. Let your users rate and comment on the behavior of the driver take respective actions. Add a bit of gamification like awarding badges, special bonuses, etc. If you seriously want to make an app like Uber with a twist.

Related read: How Can You Generate More Revenues With Apps Like Uber and Lyft?

G. Push Notifications- Did You Bother To Care For It?

As we all know that passengers and drivers need to exchange some basic information such as pick-up point, estimated time to arrive, short updates on delays and more. For solving these, Uber has installed a lighter version of chat app like Whatsapp.

But I must mention that developing this takes a lot of time. So you may leave this in the initial phase of taxi app development. But sending out a standard push notification to users on their ride details and drivers is something essential. So hire taxi app developers who do not miss this out.

Use Google Cloud Messaging or Apple Push notifications for iPhone and for real-time text messaging. To make an app like Uber you can use Twilio. However, instead of GCM for the Android version, your taxi app developers might use Google Firebase Framework and instead of real-time messaging could be an option. But it depends since SMS integration is an additional cost since you need to buy it from a third-party service provider.

Now, pulling the brakes

You want an Uber app Clone, but not exactly all the similar features like it. You do want your taxi app to look like the way you want and not a second Uber, copying it from A-Z. Will developing an app like Uber and Lyft help you survive the stiff competition of the taxi business? The taxi app development company you choose must make you excel. It is not Uber, but the platform in which it is built made it what it is. And to give those taxi startup a taste of success we came up with the idea of Inno Ride (Taxi App Solution from AllRide Apps). It fits the answer to your query “how to make an app like Uber”?

Related Read-Top 10 Taxi App Development Company You Will Like to Hire

We developed this robust taxi app solution that is easy to use and customize as per your business needs. Inno Ride gives complete control of your taxi app, from domain name to colors, content to layout and instant access to the best-looking themes. While creating Uber-like app, you must check our solution. With years of dealing with a request to create an app like Uber both as developers and users, one can easily count us. We are not a new player. We have been turning great ideas into reality since inception.

But keeping all things aside. It’s time to make up your mind  – why will you develop another app like Uber or Lyft? Is it not a better option to choose a taxi app development company that will establish you as a brand in itself?

What’s Your Take?

To be or not to be Uber – the choice is yours. But the fact is – you cannot make an app like Uber overnight. And if you want to make it successful, you have to look at the technology stacks that your taxi app developer uses.

At Inno Ride, thus I have kept everything transparent. I like to provide my clients with options that will certainly make an app like Uber. But be better at it. So what do you think after reading this? Will you like to make an app like Uber for yourself? And if you are already on the path of developing one, reconsider these things or better have a chat with your taxi app developer.

Would you like to hear your experiences on how you want to build an app like Uber and Lyft or build your own uber app? Connect with AllRide Taxi Booking Solution experts and take your business to new heights.