How I made Uber-like app in no time with JavaScript and secret sauce

medium.com

20 points·RomanPushkin··3 comments

As it's bee said many time before:

- the difference between 'x-like' and 'x-dropin-replacent' is huge. Everybody can make a twitter clone in an hour. However, if you want to build the search feature, handle the conversations corner cases, have the same pixel perfect ui and scale, it takes years. - the value of uber is not in the app.

No, the value is not in the app, it's in the data, the network effects, and the ability to connect drivers and riders.

Unfortunately, none of that matters if you live in Siberia because that's also not where the "value" is.

This is a great little application that solves a specific problem that a company like Uber never will. Critiquing it because "it's not that hard" and "that's not where the value is" really misses the point, and illustrates something of the rottenness in the Silicon Valley / VC approach.

Finally. Good job! It's a great idea for adoption by existing taxi services in undeserved regions and self-organized networks. I remember Mexico made some sort of Taxi riding app to make it safer for riders. It would check against a database the driver's license plate and have their picture as well so you can verify that the taxi was legit. With your app governments and other organizations have something to build on top of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com