How could they have cancellation fees at all if you could just turn off your phone and claim it died to evade them?
I don't know Android well enough to say, but my instinct is that every mobile device capable of running the Uber app has a low power mode. The app should be able to query the state of the phone to determine whether or not the user is likely to lose power before the pickup occurs.
But of course, doing that would require that the Uber app was honest about when the driver is actually going to get to the rider.
There are solutions to this problem. I don't know what all of them are, but I guarantee you that they exist. It's not that hard of a problem.
And we also don't know how much of a problem that cancellations are in reality. And we don't know how much of this hypothetical problem is actually caused by drivers fucking with things.
So, I dunno, I think your question involves a lot of assumptions that aren't really correct. Like, not even remotely. You're pretending there's a legit problem, where we have no evidence of one.
> I don't know Android well enough to say.
> It's not that hard of a problem.
Even if you could get this to work it's not at all obvious that it's desirable. Right now the system is simple, you order a car and for some reason the app turns off, you get charged a cancellation fee. That's a hard problem to solve.
What if you have one Uber and two customers who'd like to order it, one with 3% battery and one with 97%? Should the risk of sending the car to the user with 3% battery purely be assumed by Uber?
So its not whether its possible to do this or not. It's whether its something you want to do. An elegant middle ground can be attained by putting phone in power saving mode or by asking for an alternative phone number ( of your date ??) in case the battery is dangerously low .
[0] "'We absolutely don’t use that to push you a higher surge price, but it’s an interesting psychological fact of human behaviour.'” - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/05/22/uber-app-can-...