Admittedly, I was venting over inaction of the taxi industry to innovate. While I do think other competitors, like Lyft, can do those things I'm skeptical if the legacy industry could catch up even if the way has been paved. I imagine the ideal would be a "platform" that gets sold regionally.
Like McDonalds, at least for travelers (or, well, me) having the app already installed and setup with a form of payment is huge. I've visited cities, like Austin, when they didn't have Lift/Uber and figuring out their "local service" was rough. You've landed at an airport and likely don't have great service. To seek and download and register a new app is a big burden. It's also why using a credit card internationally is much less hassle than getting local currency.
"Apps" and "services" are ubiquitous, but incumbents are pretty terrible at them. Large organizations like Apple, Playstation, or Obamacare have had rocky launches of services--they had more incentives to polish things later. Often those services would go down completely Christmas morning. Many apps like my local bank or library, have terrible apps. That's how I imagine legacy or regional taxis responding to Uber.
It's been over a decade and a lot of those features weren't that novel at the time. I've heard of a few cities internally having decent apps, but it hasn't been that wide spread. Maybe that will change?