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Comment by a1o | Hacker News Reader

Grab also has Uber-like service doesn't it?

Grab is basically Uber + Ubereats in south-east Asia

(Quite literally - Uber sold off their SEA operations to Grab in exchange for a stake in Grab, when Uber exited the SEA market)

Grab is also a bank

Yes. And they accept cryptocurrency natively (without using gift cards), extremely practical for believers in the space.

Uber also owns a significant share of Grab.

More crucial to their success was that Grab accepts cash payments. This alone was the reason why Grab succeeded and Uber failed in SEA.

Interesting because when I traveled in India they had cash as an option for Uber. I didn’t try UberEats though.

Uber Eats exited India long back.

Cash is not only accepted but in specific Indian cities expected , I.e. the driver will call you and if you don’t offer cash they will cancel the booking or won’t show up at all .

Can you elaborate? In the U.S. you place an order and are quoted a price which you pay (typically with a credit card) before your order is sent for delivery. Receiving a call from the delivery driver about paying in cash would feel like an extra fee. In the situation you describe is no payment made in advance?

The commenter was talking about cabs and autorickshaws, not food delivery drivers.

Uber and others pay out on a weekly basis. Cabbies would rather have the cash now. And by cash, they mean a direct payment outside the app. Typically this would mean a direct transfer via UPI.

As you hypothesize it is about extra fees and renegotiating the price. Common tactics include asking more than the price shown on the app, or refusing to give change back,or pretending not to have any etc.

Uber always had cash options in SEA and still does in countries it continues to operate in, like India .

Each country has and always has a lot autonomy on features and services offered . Just their booking methods in different airports can have lot of variation , OTP workflows in geos with high no show rates , transportation options like motorcycles or Tuk tuk or public transit integration all are unique to many locations

Consolidation and exits happened for variety of reasons i strongly doubt it was ever because of product features or lack thereof

Its main services include ride-hailing, food delivery, payment and digital bank and more...

I gather it's kind of a "super-app" for its region, similar to WeChat in China? (Or what Elon Musk wants X to be, but so far isn't even in the ballpark...)

X has nothing to do in this comparison.

Use Grab a lot and I don't consider it a super-app. It truly is the Ride Hailing/Food delivery service app to use in certain parts of SE Asia. WeChat has a massive ecosystem in that its chat, payments, and a million company built "apps".

Kind of, but not exactly. Super-apps like WeChat have a huge number of independent apps within it, operated by third-parties. Apps like Grab are more like different divisions within the same organisation. So Grab is more like Uber + Uber Eats + InstaCart all operated by the same company, inside a single app. But sometimes people call things like Grab super-apps as well. I think it’s probably wrong to describe something as a super-app unless it has third-party apps within it.

Not just Grab, most of tech giants in Asia (granted, I only know about the sinosphere) pursuit the "super app" idea. Here in Vietnam even the bank apps try to be super apps, it's somewhat hilarious but part of asian tech identity that makes us unique compare to the western tech scene.

The most puzzling one for me is AirAsia. Like I’m going to use an airline app to order food to my home. At least use a separate brand!

Banks all over the world do it . American banks do it too.

In many bank apps they will do travel, stay, cars, vacations, shopping and other dozen things like that .

It is not just banks , airlines do it too, they are so good at it, they are sometimes called finance companies with incidental air transport business.

Way off-topic, but is there a betting pool that Elon Musk is going to make it mandatory for the government agencies to use Super-X to do their work? And maybe for citizens too? It will obviously fail-whale all the time, but hey, he'll ignore the parts where it's not working when stroking his ego.

Somewhere there's a Dr. Strangelove kind of comedy where a wrongly addressed tweet sends the nukes flying, because the competent engineers on X will make an API over tweets, you see...

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