Rideshare mobile apps are considered to be a real breakthrough of the 21st century. These apps are beneficial for both passengers and drivers. The first ones get an opportunity to avoid travelling in public transport. They can enjoy comfortable and fast driving for a lower price. The drivers, on the other hand, can compensate for petroleum. Moreover, we shouldn’t forget about the modern realities of our life. Because of a Covid-19 pandemic people not always can travel in public transport due to some restrictions. And if these restrictions are not in force, passengers can opt for using such apps just to make their trip safer.
Due to all these advantages, the carsharing applications world becomes more diverse and sophisticated. Almost all people worldwide know about the existence of such apps and a lot of them have already used the services of such apps as Uber or BlaBlaCar. Despite a wide choice in terms of ridesharing apps, everyone still has a chance to create a sophisticated product and benefit from it. Luckily for you, our team will share some tips with you as to how to make a rideshare app. If you are serious about it, just keep reading this article till the end!
How to build a valuable ridesharing product
Taking into account the fact that a carsharing app market is very competitive, make sure you have come up with a unique product idea. The conception of your application determines your future success. Cashless payments, location tracking, safe communication between people and many other features will be crucial for your app.
1. Decide on the app type
Before you begin the process of app development, study carpooling, rideshare, and lift-sharing markets and your potential rivals and competitors. The most popular examples of carsharing or carpooling apps are Pooling, and BlaBlaCar. Such apps presuppose sharing some spare sears in a vehicle with the passengers who are planning to visit the same destination. It may be for both short trips and long distances.
On the other hand, ridesharing is about regular driving. It may be called a regular taxi alternative. In this case it is a client who determines the destination and can share his or her ride with a friend or a group of friends. Among such apps are Gett, Liftshare, Grab, and, of course, Uber.
2. Take the preparatory stage seriously!
If you have a unique idea and know for sure what your product should look like, you have to focus on details. To make your application beneficial, decide on a proper monetization model, try to calculate, and forecast profits. Moreover, you need to choose the targeted audience. You should take into account a lot of criteria like age, gender, geography, occupation, income level, etc.
As a rule, ridesharing apps can boast of a diverse audience, although there are such apps which were designed mainly for people who need airport transfers or for offering special services like UberEATS delivery.
On this stage it is a good idea to google a lot! Collect information about your competitors, analyze their products, strong sides and vulnerabilities of them. It will help you understand what product you should create to make something unique and beneficial.
3. Choose your platform
You should know that there are two platforms for building a mobile app: iOS and Android. Moreover, you can opt for cross-platform development and make an app for both of them. When making such a decision, think of your targeted audience and their possible preferences. For example, Android is more popular than iOS in China, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Completely different situation is in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Western Europe. It is interesting to know that platform preferences can also depend on gender. Women are considered to opt more frequently for iOS and men for Android. Furthermore, iOS users are also younger than Android ones.
Another pivotal thing is that building an iOS app will cost you less than for Android. What’s more, the programming language used for building Apple products is considered to be easier to learn and work with. Consequently, it makes the app building processes faster.
4. Key functions of a successful carsharing application
While building a carsharing application you should remember that it will consist of three different apps — passenger, driver, and manager ones. These applications have different functions and features. Each of them must be appealing to a targeted audience and beneficial for you.
As you can guess, building such an app will cost you three times more than a usual product of app development. Now we will underline the most essential features of a successful ridesharing app and their estimated costs.
Clients app – to develop such an application for one platform an average app development company will spend nearly 900 hours. The most pivotal features for these apps include logging and personal pages, ride tracking, booking, price estimates, push notifications, messaging and feedback options.
Among other valuable features may be favorite-driver requests, special services or cabs requests, planned bookings, etc. All in all, you can include any function you want to your product to make it unique and useful for the clients.
Driver app – to develop such an application for one platform an average app development company will spend nearly 400 hours.
For these apps the following features are compulsory — personal page, accepting requests, navigation, earnings tabs, billing and feedback section, reference writing, push notifications. To make an app more appealing you can add the function of the passenger’s music player synchronization.
Admin panel – to develop such a website an average app development company will spend nearly 250 hours.
Admin panel may be presented in a form of application or a website. The main functions here are navigation support, monitoring drivers, revenues, and payrolls, database maintenance. All in all, it is the brain of your ridesharing mobile app.
Well, there are a few examples of apps which can be used both by passengers and drivers like in BlaBlaCar. Another important thing is to think about the offline support options. Thanks to it people will be capable of solving all controversial issues in a twinkle of an eye. Remember that the more rave notices about your product you have, the more successful your product will be. Clients are the main focus for all businessmen, that is why you have to work out an algorithm which will allow you to check the drivers’ licenses and qualifications.
5. What about costs?
After reading the previous section you know a number of hours required to develop an average carsharing mobile application. To make the development process possible you should hire a team with some particular skills. If you want to observe the results of your work faster, you can hire several specialists of the same competences and expertise.
An appropriate team to build a good product should consist of visionaries, that include strategist, PM, researcher, business analysts, designers, QA managers, developers, and marketing and sales specialists.
It is almost impossible to calculate the cost of your future product due to multiple reasons. However, you can ask specialists about their hourly rates and according to this information think of your budget.
Well, you can also hire a team from another country to save some money, but it is a risky decision. Just remember about cultural borders, language difficulties, different time zones, etc. The Norway average rate for application building is $80 per hour, while in Ukraine it will cost you two times cheaper for performing the same task.
Moreover, if you want to take control over all processes you can opt for an in-house development. It means that you are supposed to hire a team on a full-time basis. Appealing, though, it may seem, it will cost you a great deal of money. If your resources are limited, this option is not a good one for you.
Drawing conclusions
Taking into consideration all modern tendencies, ridesharing mobile apps are expected to become more and more popular. Such a growth in popularity can be connected with sophisticated tech innovations such as self-driving vehicles, big data aggregators, GPS-based cab monitoring tools, and many others. This year the ridesharing market revenue accounted to $183,677 million, which is the best provement of the above-mentioned facts.
All in all, everyone stands a chance of creating a valuable and useful ridesharing app. All you need is to take all the stages seriously and be ready to devote a lot of time, resources and energy to the development process. Pay attention to software innovations to keep abreast of the times, plan everything carefully, find good specialists, and set a realistic budget. By following all these tips you will be able to cope with any task and make a successful ridesharing mobile application.
