Over recent years the demand for on-demand taxi solutions is getting popular and it is flourishing. More businesses are looking forward as this business is gaining more growth and opportunities, they are searching for top mobile app development companies for smart and high-tech solutions to generate more revenue.
At the current time, multiple small and large-scale businesses compete with each other to lead the taxi booking market. Now let us look at the global market view of the taxi booking app.
The taxi booking market is expanding at a high lifting rate across the globe. In 2020 it was valued at $ 23.42 billion approximately and in 2021 it was estimated approximately 28.65 billion $ at a CAGR of 22.3%.
This growth is expected to lift more as most companies are resuming and adapting to new normals and recovering from the pandemic effect.
The market is predicted to reach 41.22 billion $ by the end of the year 2025 at a 9.5 % of CAGR.
However, an On-demand taxi solution requires huge performance optimization and seamless connectivity and it has to be productive at the backend as well in the frontend.
Therefore it is clear that you have to go for the right technology stack to make it to a successful on-demand taxi solution.
In the most layman’s term, if you can improve the quality of an existing service to a degree that you can offer it on demand, it becomes an on-demand service.
In case of taxis, if you have the necessary blend of resource, infrastructure, accessibility and technology, you indeed can offer this service.
So every on-demand mobility solution needs technology stack to operate under in the following categories:
Geo Location: Location services are fundamental to the working of any on-demand taxi app. From the app picking up your location and sharing it as the pickup location to the driver to letting a customer know of the driver’s whereabout in real-time on a map, on-demand services can’t be realised without location technology.
Geolocation is indeed the most important technology in Uber’s technology stack. But you might be interested in other functionalities as well if you want to know how to build an app like Uber.
Notification
An On-demand taxi app requires a notification feature as it allows to keep users to stay updated with exclusive offers and deals. Notification can be divided into two functional types: Push Notification and Text Notification.
Push and Text Notification
Push notification is more effective and noticeable. It is an alluring form of messaging. Whereas text notification is useful if a user is offline, or the internet is unavailable. With the help of text, a notification gets assured in delivering a message.
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.
Notifications that apps in an on-demand taxi solution receives are
- Driver: Accept or decline ride
- Rider: Ride Accepted
- Rider: Ride Canceled
- Rider: Ride Arriving
- Rider: Surge Pricing Over*
- Raider: Fare updated*
This is how different platforms provision push notifications.
SMS notifications:
Twilio is a marker leader. But there are many effective options too that cost less and provide better support.
Inter-app communication
The apps in the solution, the driver and rider’s app, need to communicate with each other at many instances, without which the entire solution will collapse to ashes.
A large part of the communication takes place on the cloud and a passenger can still hail a taxi even if he goes offline after he books a taxi.
However, the driver must stay online all the time as the passenger app tracks his live location on an interactive app on the app and instantaneous location is shared over a data or Wi-Fi connection.
This is when the two apps communicate and make who operation possible:
- Send a booking request to drivers
- Live Location Driver app’s to passenger’s
- Pick up and drop off location (Passenger to Driver app)
- Chat between driver and passenger’s app
- Cancellation (either ways)
- Fare calculation
- Ratings and review
Inter-app communication between the drivers’ and passengers’ app takes place over mobile data communication or Wi-Fi. The data exchange is often routed over the application server. The data could be encrypted or not. Enterprises demand end-to-end encryption.
Payment
Payment is one of the most imperative functions of any on-demand taxi service. On-demand taxi apps insist on a cashless payment system over a payment gateway.
When targeted toward geography where cashless payments are still in a nascent state have started to include cash payment options. Also, the split fare is a feature that has lately become a standard across taxi booking apps.
Payment gateway
Braintree is one of the leaders in the mobile payment market to accept card payments and boasts Uber as its clients. Another great payment system, a competitor of Braintree, and a payment gateway preferred in our custom taxi app development services, Stripe provides its payment services to fast-moving on-demand economy startups: Lyft, Postmates and Instacart.
PayPal’s Card.io lets you enter your credit card details by simply scanning the credit card with your phone’s camera. The functionality is available for both iOS and Android apps.
Split fare is a default option in Braintree and Stripe
Infrastructure and storage
Web and mobile
Web
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.
