Friday, October 21, 2016

Build Like Uber - Earn Like Uber. Here's How

What would you do if your idea for a mobile app startup has already ripened?

Unique ideas are like rare diamonds. Also, the technology is growing rapidly and there is reasonable chance that the app idea you’re holding in your head might already be implemented.

Back in 2009, two entrepreneurs from San Francisco - Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp - founded a taxi booking service and named it Uber company.

Since Uber’s launch, taxi booking startup has grown enormously and turned into international transportation network company.

Today, Uber is expanded in 35 countries that includes more than 100 cities. Needless to say, such great ideas tend to be repeated.

Take a look around the latest buzz.

Taxify - An Estonian startup - closed a $100K seed round.

Another competitor of Uber in Spain called Cabify received $8M in series A.

It is recommended that you check out all the competitors before you begin to start your startup.

By the way, have you read our article about: How Uber-like On-demand Services are Disrupting Traditional Businesses?

This time, we’ll share the secrets behind how does Uber work and how does Uber make money.

photo credit: Yalantis


The Matter About Maps & Location


Any startup company that provides delivery of physical goods to its consumers needs to deal with mapping, especially in taxi booking services.

Most of the taxi-booking apps rely on the following features.

Identifying the customer’s device location.
Giving driving directions.
Drawing routes.

Uber Technologies


It is, without any doubts, necessary that you must determine the current location of your customer.

So how does Uber accomplish this?

Well, the Uber iOS app basically uses the Corelocation framework that gives user’s device location. This framework also allows Uber to define geographic regions and monitor the movements.

In the Uber Android app, they integrate Google location APIs to get the current location of user’s device.

But What About Directions & Routes?


To display directions on the map, the Uber team used Mapkit in their iOS app. This Mapkit registers the app as a routing app and makes directions available on user’s device.

Similarly, the Uber Android app gets routes and directions by using Google Maps Android API v2. This new version is even much simpler for the developers to display route drawing.


Push Notifications


To implement the push notifications service, Uber has integrated Apple push notifications in their iOS app and Google Cloud Messaging Service for their Android app.

This is good but what if user’s mobile data is unavailable and offline?

How will a user get notification for the ride status?

The Uber has already took care of that as well. From developer’s point of view, all push notifications are unidirectional. This means, all the push notifications that are being send might not be received.

This is why the Uber also started sending ride status through SMS. because if the SMS is failed to deliver, the SMS provider always informs them. By doing this, they made customer experience even more efficient.

Revenue Model


Talking about money, Uber’s revenue model is giving around $20M per week from the global revenue.

Now if you don’t know, Uber uses cashless system. Customers use debit card or credit card before they ride, or they use a promo code. This eliminates the entire human-to-human cash transfers, including the driver’s tip. Uber automatically adds 20% driver’s tip in your fare.

Talking about profit, Uber takes 20% of a driver’s fare that makes quite a profitable revenue model.

photo credit: Yalantis


However, for accepting card payments, Uber has partnered with Braintree. It is a leading mobile payment platform. Paypal bought Braintree for $800M back in 2013 and currently Braintree makes $4 billion per year on mobile.


Uber has also integrated Paypal’s Card.io for credit card scanning in US. the app usually “sees” the card, reads the information and enters the data for you. While in Android, you have to manually enter all credit card information for the Uber account.

Point is, Uber has taken care of each and every small aspect in their business model as well as revenue model, leaving no bugs behind. Also, they’re always consistent for making their customers’ lives easy by offering quick ways to book a taxi.

Even we at Space-O, offer Uber app clone development. So if you’re looking into building next Uber targeting either a specific region or all over globe. With over 200 developers, not only we have expertise in mobile app development, but we also suggest & include features that are locally acceptable and are in-demand.

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