Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

> This is such a non-feature for 99% of users.

I would imagine that travellers are an outsized percentage of high spenders, even if they are a small portion of users.

Totally this. It isn't uncommon for a whales (usually 1 to 2 percent of an apps users) to account for 30 to 50 percent of their profit. So it is very worth thinking of those customers first.

Not all customers are equal. And if you build your app or site without knowing that you may well chase the wrong features.

I would agree with this. At home I walk, ride my bike, get on transit, rent a carshare etc. When I'm travelling, I'm walking or calling an Uber/Lyft. I'll take a train or bus only if it's super easy to navigate.

I spent a lot of 2018/2019 travelling around North America. It was wonderful to never have to consider a taxi.

Same here. In my local area I understand the transit. I have a transit card. But when I am in a foreign city that speaks a different language these are not realistic options unless I spend effort on figuring that out and deal with local municipal transit authorities, which is not the vacation experience I am looking for.

As a frequent traveller, I would be much more inclined to either pick the airports that are going to be relevant to me ever or pick the destination airport when I am at the source airport which Uber can easily detect. I am visiting ~10-15 airports most of the time. I would be happy to spend some time to set this up on my phone so i not need to waste a huge amount of space and bandwidth every time that I update Uber. For Uber it would be a win too, reducing the size of the app significantly. Maybe it is only me.

Don’t app updates only push deltas anyway? It’s only the initial install that’s large.

A willingness to put in some time up front to tailor a technology experience to yourself is one thing that separates the average HN user from the population at large.

For a significant majority of users, if it doesn't work well out of the gate, it's broken.

Even as an avid Hacker News user, I wouldn't tailor an app download to save bandwidth/space. Both of those are abundant.

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