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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

> Tooling is a major issue: compiling the app from scratch takes 25-30 minutes on iOS and around 10 on Android

As a relatively naive to massive apps iPhone developer (I’ve made apps with millions of downloads, but nothing on Ubers scale) I find it confusing how a relatively straight forward iPhone app like Uber can be so complex. It’s basically a map and 3 buttons? And an ‘in the car’ state. They weren’t doing pool or bill splitting at this point I don’t think. I’d have thought everything else is back-end complexity?

Can someone do an explain like I’m 5 on this?

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Here‘s a pretty comprehensive video about it: https://youtu.be/zmeCYiD0hnE

TL;DW (IIRC): Uber is in a ton of markets and each one has significant differences, for example in payment providers - the app needs to support all of them and each comes with its own SDK.

From memory, when this came up before there was a lot more information about how they have to jam in a load of stuff to deal with international travel so that everything works as soon as you arrive in another country.

This exact question was answered before here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346

Even reading all of that I am still surprised to find that the Uber Rider app is a over 1M LOC per platform. 20% of the functionality used by most users takes how many lines? It seems that they’re chasing the long tail of covering every global trip-taking use case. It might be fun to build, but how many of those features have a positive ROI?

You land in Madrid. You hail an uber using the app. You stand there for 2 hours, hail multiple drivers. The uber never comes. For some reason the uber on the map drives in circles around the airport - then cancels. You eventually get in a cab. The driver says 1) uber cars can't be that close to the airport - and 2) that he doesn't take cards. You no longer use Uber in Spain. You tell the rest of your family to not use Uber when they get to Spain.

It's the ancient Microsoft Word vs. Google Docs debate. Without long tail features Uber would be less valuable to each customer.

Where to start? A wild guess:

- A/B testing capabilities

- Different features per country/region

- Different payment methods per country

- ...

I mean it's like e-commerce, when you stay in a single country, things are easy. When you go international, wild sh*t happens to cover all the spectrum of scenarios and respect the laws in place, while keeping it simple enough to maintain for devs.

I asked this question to another iOS dev a while ago and they mentioned the way that uber is a single app that functions in all countries it’s available, you never have to download a country specific version by design. I think for that reason it needs a whole lot of regional specific functionality and localisation, I believe a lot of work is done client side too. Someone from uber could chime in and correct me if I’m wrong.

Edit: looks like it was also brought up in a previous thread.

https://mobile.twitter.com/StanTwinB/status/1336890442768547...

It's way more complex than it seems

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