Technology Stack Behind Lyft and Uber

Updated On: February 8, 2023

Updated By: appsrhino

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The transportation industry is getting extremely competitive due to the disruption of on-demand taxi solutions like Uber, Lyft. These market giants have developed robust mobile applications that have enabled users to travel from one place to another with a tap on the mobile screen and other companies are heavily using uber and lyft tech stack. 

The massive success of these market leaders can be measured in terms of revenue generated. As per data provided by Crunchbase, since its launch, Uber has generated about $24.2 Billion from 22 rounds of venture capital and private equity investors. And as per Crunchbase Data, Lyft has generated $4.9 Billion in funding from 19 rounds. Such market dominants have inspired many budding on-demand enterprises to move ahead in the competition. 

Demand strives for the supply chain industry. The demand for a taxi is high as people want to move to their destination with utmost convenience. So, In case of taxis, if you have the necessary blend of resource, infrastructure, accessibility, and technology, you indeed can offer this service. This clearly requires you to opt for the right technology stack just like uber app technology to make it to an effective on-demand taxi solution. 

Understanding this gets easy by breaking your solutions into different simpler features.

The transportation industry is getting extremely competitive due to the disruption of on-demand taxi solutions like Uber, Lyft. These market giants have developed robust mobile applications that have enabled users to travel from one place to another with a tap on the mobile screen and other companies are heavily using uber tech stack and lyft tech stack.

The massive success of these market leaders can be measured in terms of revenue generated.

As per data provided by Crunchbase, since its launch, Uber has generated about $24.2 Billion from 22 rounds of venture capital and private equity investors.

And as per Crunchbase Data, Lyft has generated $4.9 Billion in funding from 19 rounds.

Such market dominants have inspired many budding on-demand enterprises to move ahead in the competition.

Demand strives for the supply chain industry. The demand for a taxi is high as people want to move to their destination with utmost convenience. So, In case of taxis, if you have the necessary blend of resource, infrastructure, accessibility, and technology, you indeed can offer this service.

This clearly requires you to opt for the right technology stack just like uber app technology to make it to an effective on-demand taxi solution. Understanding this gets easy by breaking your solutions into different simpler features.

Features and Companies involved in lyft tech stack

Geolocation

Geolocation is indeed the most important for on-demand taxi solutions. Location services are an important part of Uber Tech Stack kind of apps for working on any on-demand taxi App. From accessing the driver's whereabouts to sharing pick up location to accessing the route for the destination in real-time, all these events are not possible without Geolocation technology in on-demand taxi solutions.

FeaturesPlatformAPI
Device locationiOSCoreLocation Framework
AndroidGoogle's Location API
NavigationiOSMapKit
AndroidGoogle Maps Android API

But there are other functionalities which you to foster on demand taxi solutions.

Notification

On-demand technology stack of Uber, Lyft, Ola sends notifications to the driver and customers through Push Notification Services, SMS, and Email.

PlatformPush Notification Enabler
iOSApple Push Notification Service
AndroidGoogle Cloud Messaging

Push and Text Notifications

Along with Push Notifications, sending text notifications is vital in case the device goes offline. Moreover, the Apple Push Notification Service queues notifications in a way that notification received when the device was offline will not be delivered when it comes online.

There is no way for a developer to know whether the notification was delivered or not in the case of Apple Push Notification Service, which isn’t the case with Google Notifications.

Cloud Communication ProviderClients
TwilioUber
Netflix
Hulu
Lyft
NexmoViber
Fitbit
GitHub
AirBnb
SinchEasy Taxi
Badoo
GitHub
SnapDeal
Rebtel

Notifications that are sent to the driver and customer are:

  • Driver: Accept or decline a ride
  • Rider: Ride accepted/ canceled
  • Rider: Ride Arrival
  • Rider: Surge Pricing Over
  • Rider: Fare Updated

This is how iOS and Android enable push notifications:

PlatformPush Notification Enabler
iOSApple push notification service
AndroidGoogle Cloud Messaging

On Demand Taxi App Features

SMS Notifications:

In the case of SMS notifications, Twilio is a market leader. But other options are available that provide robust support with less cost.

Inter-App Communication

There are two apps that operate together, One app is for driver and another app is for the passenger. In many instances, the driver and the passenger need to communicate with each other, without which the entire system will collapse. A passenger can still hail a taxi offline after he books a taxi as a large part of communication takes place in the cloud.

The instantaneous location of the driver is shared with the passenger in real-time so a driver needs to be online all the time. So, a passenger can interact with him using an interactive app.

Here's how Intercommunication takes place in an app via uber tech stack :

  • Send/accept the booking request
  • Current location detection
  • Direction tracking
  • Ride/Fare calculations
  • Chat and messaging
  • Ride rating and review
  • Cancel request – both ways

The communication between apps takes place over Wi-Fi or Mobile data. The flow of communication is decided by a data traveling protocol. The data is routed to the server through destination points. Data could be encrypted or decrypted depending on the choice of the provider. Generally, organizations demand end-to-end encryption.

Payment

Payment is the most significant part of an on-demand taxi service app. And it is primarily based on the cashless payment system through a payment gateway. Braintree is one of the top leaders in the mobile payment market domain and has premium clients like Uber to boast.

Stripe is another payment services option that offers equally reliable, dependable and prompt service. These services also offer a split payment feature which allows the whole act of billing and payment much more user-friendly. Another great extension to the facility is payment scanning service offered by PayPal’s Card.io that allows your phone’s camera to scan a credit card and this is available for both iOS and Android users.

Infrastructure and Storage

For the infrastructure and storage solution to optimally coordinate and communicate with backend services, you need to put up with a whole range of functional factors and processing entities offering a complete package of infrastructure and storage resources served by a facility of Routing & Service Discovery, Virtual Machines Caching & Queuing, App Provisioning, and Languages, among others.

Long-term data storage 
Distributed storage and analyticsHadoop Warehouse
Caching and queuingRedis, Twenproxy, Celery Workers
Searching and visualizationsELK stack
App ProvisioningDocker, Mesos, Aurora
Routing and Service DiscoveryRingpop, TChannel, Hyperbahn
Virtual MachinesPacker, Vagrant, Boto and Unison
System ConfigurationPuppet
Inventory ManagementClusto
LanguagesGo and Java
Mapping VisualizationsSVG, Canvas 2D and WebGL

Web and Mobile

Mobile development is 100% trunk development and train releases. You can use Git for software storage. Mobile app developers must commit directly to master. So many people branching and landing causes too much risk. Work on an application configuration platform that’s calm to work with and build on top of, empowering stakeholders to bring change in your taxi businesses’ services and businesses according to uber and lyft tech stack.

Web

LanguagesNode.js
Web ServerExpress.js
Rendering, State Handling and BuildingReact.js, Standard flux and Gulp.js

Mobile

AndroidBuild SystemGradle
NetworkingOKHttp, Retrofit and Gson
Dependency Injection FraeworkDagger
Image loadingPicasso
Automation CodingExpresso
LoggingTimber
iOSRepositoryBuck
Placement and SizingMasonry and SnapKit
Crash DetectionKSCrash
TestingOCMock
StorageLevelDB
BackendSchemaless and MySQL

AppsRhino is a mobile app development company that develops an app for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and large enterprises. In the 5 years of existence, we have been able to help companies realize their goals on the mobile platform.

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