Ultimately, I wonder if Uber is prime to be disrupted if drivers got together and funded a few engineers to build a city-scale service for the hailing and payment aspect.
Apparently a whole bunch of folks are trying to do just that.
I was going to provide just one example, but a web search[0] shows a whole bunch of these efforts in a variety of locales. As such, I just provided the web search results here.
[0] https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=ride%20share%20cooperativ...
NYC used to have Juno, but it went bankrupt in 2019. I feel like if you can't run a single-city rideshare app in NYC, you're gonna have a hard time doing it anywhere else.
Searching and installing a random app introduces a slight amount of friction, but I don't think payment necessarily has to be that much of a hassle. Just use apple/google pay.
Obviously this all could be easy, but it's amazing how many apps fail to make things easy to onboard. When I've just gotten done traveling for hours and just want to get to some place to relax, the last thing I want is to wrangle new account creation in some app where they're trying to be cheap and haven't hired any UX designers to smooth out the process because "you can rebuild Uber with 3 smart devs" as everyone on HN says.
I haven't used it (I always pay cash, as the drivers are charged ~3-5% per fare for "CC processing" when a card is used), but every NYC taxi has a feature where you can pair with the onboard system and pay with your phone.
Not sure what "pairing" requires, perhaps someone else has used this feature and can comment.
For most of Europe that means country level, for the US and other federal states, that probably means at the state level.
Last time I tried the Lyon app it was barebone and not really up to par with Uber by a large margin. But still.
And they're...okay. I think they all use the same white label technology to make their apps.