UBER, the app doesn’t need any introduction to get identified. Uber is an app which people use it for their daily travel. It is a great invention for riders. The users don’t need to wait anymore for taxies to come and pick you up. Uber taxies are too fast to reach at your current place, pick you up and leave for your destination. One key advantage UBER has over regular taxi services is that it is more predictable. People in general don’t like uncertainty. Uber minimizes uncertainty in booking a taxi in following ways
Click to book – Prior to Uber you would have either called a taxi service or tried to hail it on street. With both actions you don’t know how long it will take to book a taxi. As compared to that, with Uber you can book a taxi in matter of clicks on your smartphone.
Live tracking – You can track your taxi on your phone. This gives a sense of higher reliability as opposed to calling a taxi where you were unsure if the taxi will turn up on time.
Pricing estimate – You can get an estimate of how much it will cost you by specifying your pickup and drop points. This is even more helpful when you are new to a place.
Everything about the app is inside the app itself. Uber is a full-fledged service that requires people to provide the service. It requires boots on the ground to recruit people. Its people, its cars, its payment processing, infrastructure, fraud detection, intelligent pricing and much more.
Underneath the tip of the iceberg which is the app is a whole world of problems that these companies have solved in order to provide you with this service.
How it works??
Each time when the passenger uses application to call the cab, Uber tracks the current location with the help of GPS in smartphones. When it tracks the exact location of the user, it sends the same information to the application server and to the driver’s application. Uber also captures the location of the driver, so it finds the one available at nearby location of the user. A notification is also received by the driver who is in the nearby location.
To build an Uber like app 3 basic things are required-
A client side and driver side app for GPS access
Integrating it with 3rd party map provider e.g. Google Maps
A reliable backend
Of course, you need to render a map on the client. The Google Maps SDK gives you everything you need. You will need an SDK to control things like markers, clusters, and navigating the map.
The biggest challenge with these kinds of services is – as usual – reliability. There are a lot of cases when something unexpected might happen: – what to do when the driver or customer loses network connectivity? His GPS starts to send wrong data (0,0 coordinates?)? Runs out of battery? He gets into an accident?
Another one – payments. If you want to process credit card payments directly from your clients, you need to be PCI-compliant, or use a service such as Stripe or Braintree that partially does the job for you.
