Where's the competition then? Uber's platform is miles ahead of everything else, Lyft included so if its just a map app with balance sheet where are the competitors?
I use Lyft in the bay area a couple of times a week and haven't noticed any gaps from when I used to use Uber.
It may take a few years but there is just too much incentive to move away from the technopoly companies like Uber, Amazon, and Google etc. to decentralized open platforms.
Furthermore, the anonymity from such technologies would greatly undermine trust between riders and drivers. Neither would know if their counterparty is a theif, rapist or simply doesn't have a valid license, safe vehicle or sufficient insurance in case of an accident.
Really, if you stop and think about it, the decentralized model has so many obvious flaws that make it unworkable except maybe in a country with a despotic totalitarian government that uses TNCs for spying on people, such that they are willing to suffer the shortcomings for the benefits of anonymity.
Beyond a handwavy "[there are] many viable paths for solutions worked out", how exactly would you architect such systems so that you can build a solution that produces a customer experience that is competitive against a mostly centralized system now that your solution needs to contend with inter-server latencies that are about two orders of magnitude higher due to the speed of light and the network hops involved?
The essential parts are: finding nearby drivers, maps on two screens, communicating updated position between the two phones, and payment. Finding nearby drivers means that a group of devices in the same geographic area need to be able to talk to each other. I feel like this is right up the alley of distributed systems. The GPS updates really only require communication between the two devices at ordinary internet speeds and updates every few seconds. For payment I do not need to invent anything, we can use Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any of the many high-transaction solutions that are coming out built on those or other cryptocurrencies. So if you want to suppose that it is impossible to have a high transaction rate with cryptocurrency, I don't have time to get into it. But I will say that the main thing that makes people think that is that they assume zero trust and that every single computer must validate every single transaction. Those just aren't _actually_ requirements.
But give it 2 years, maybe 5 years, this stuff will get sorted out. Until then there will always be naysayers saying it is impossible.
Huh, I don't know. There are about three competitors in my area. They all have an app. I enter my destination, someone picks me up, drops me off. Simple stuff. What's so great about Uber exactly?
Uber also have better minor features that you're less likely to appreciate until you need them like lost item recovery and spoitify integration.
What is the competition in Europe besides existing taxi services?
NuBank is the only tech company in Brazil I know of with solid engineers. Globo isn't that bad for frontend. UOL also has one single solid team backend with about four solid engineers.
Brazil's biggest problem is that it doesn't invest enough in education, especially English language skills. Every country competitive in software engineering has relatively strong English as a Second Language skills (at least among their brightest): China, India, South Korea, Japan, Russia, Europe.
If you don't have solid English comprehension among your country's most talented, you'll never produce world class engineering talent in sufficient quantities since the overwhelming majority of technical content is in English.
17.5% stake in Didi Chuxing is nothing to scoff at, especially considering that Uber has done better than both Facebook and Google as far as China is concerned. Apple is the only US tech company that is really succeeding in China.
33.6% stake in YandexTaxi and international Uber users can continue to use the app to hail Yandex drivers when visiting Russia. That's also far far better than Facebook and Google have fared in Russia.
In India, Uber is beating Ola. In Latam, Uber is easily beating both 99Taxis and EasyTaxi. In the Middle East, Uber is beating Careem. Uber is absolutely dominating in Mexico and other Latam countries.
Besides Didi Chuxing and YandexTaxi, the only international competitor doing well relatively against Uber is Grab, and AFAICT, Grab's success relative to Uber is largely isolated to Grab's home country Malaysia and Indonesia where they have invested most heavily. If you take all of Southeast Asia, it appears to be neck and neck.
Uber is doing well in relatively well in Europe all things considered, and winning in Europe is just a matter of time. I highly doubt the local taxi offerings will survive autonomous vehicles.