In cities with a lot of traffic and a limited number of parking spaces In cities with a lot of traffic and parking spots, it is extremely common to use taxis, public transportation, and bikes to get around. Services such as Uber let people enjoy riding in comfort and still avoid issues with parking and maintenance. This is the reason developing a taxi booking application is the best option for your business of transportation.
You can utilize our calculator to determine the approximate cost of the development of an app
Step-by-Step Guide for Taxi Booking App Development
If you are thinking about the development of a mobile app but you aren’t sure where to begin with the development of a taxi application, continue reading. We have tried to resolve the confusion for you.
Established business or new venture
The kind of mobile application that is best suited to your requirements will depend on various aspects. The first is whether you have a taxi service in place and you want to supplement it by developing an app or beginning a new venture and planning to connect with drivers.
Business Model
Next, you must determine the business model you want to implement, that is, whether you have an organization that employs drivers and pays them a salary, or you’re an Uber-like enterprise. Uber earns money from drivers for rides they earn from the standard taxi order base. The passengers pay the drivers directly.
The payment method is dependent on the business model selected, and it can be difficult to choose the best one.
Understanding the Market
It is essential to understand the market you plan to enter, whether you develop an app for taxis within your region or city, and then scale it up later, or you decide to create an international service. Based on the plan you choose, select a payment method that is suitable for the model you choose. Each country has their own preferred payment systems and international platforms are unique too. The authorization process can be carried out by a local payment system. These factors affect the difficulty of integration and can lead to testing, for local payment systems, is particularly difficult. With this knowledge in mind the taxi apps developers are able to provide more precise estimates of the time and effort required.
Financing
Every project requires a way to complete it, and so it is important to determine the source of your funding from. It could be through the form of a loan, through your own funds, or investment. The latter is the most effective way to break any new ground in the business world.
Marketing strategy
Once you have a clear idea of the product you plan to introduce, you must think about a marketing strategy you can implement.
First, you must know how to get drivers interested and then promote your product, which customers’ issues to overcome to attract new and repeat customers.
Possible scenarios
Prior to developing taxi-friendly mobile applications, it is important to think about all the possible user stories to determine those that are important and leave out the less important ones.
After that, you can design a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) to gather feedback, implement the required adjustments, and then proceed to gain market share as you have planned.
Problems with Taxi Booking App Development
The development process cannot be completed without challenges to overcome. The main challenges we’ve encountered as an application development company for taxis are as follows.
How do you deal with stops at an individual’s request or made by traffic
How do you handle stops based on the request of the passenger in the event that he would like to smoke, say. On the other hand, the driver could declare it. But, our client would prefer to automate this feature.
We then have to deal with the fact that GPS doesn’t stop when a car slows down. It displays it as a move around a specific location.
However we also need to find a solution to traffic jams, to ensure that the sensor will not take a slower speed when there is congestion in the transportation system as a stopping point and then charge the passenger for it.
Geolocation inaccuracy
Google Maps is not an adequate technology for integrating into taxi apps. Taxi drivers in Ukraine make use of City Guide since it provides more precise coordinates, places and addresses. In other countries, the geolocation systems local to them must be taken into consideration and compared to Google Maps to choose what is the most appropriate.
GPS Testing
Since taxis are dependent on following a certain way, it is essential to test the route conducted to ensure that it is exact. It is recommended to either simulate the route or use a real vehicle and try it out live. Cost of a ride calculation
It can be a difficult process to automate the cost of rides calculation, particularly when it’s a long distance, has multiple stops or to a different city.
Car park description
Based on the model of business you select The driver app must be developed in accordance with. If you own a parking lot, there’s no need to approve vehicles; however, if you are following the Uber model, the vehicles must be scrutinized for authenticity, and photos of the vehicles should be provided. Additionally, drivers are required to deposit funds into their accounts.
The way these challenges are dealt with and the features that are implemented into the solution developed will ultimately determine the total cost for developing a taxi app. Let’s take a look at the features that the taxi app has in greater specific detail.
The most important features to have for any taxi booking app development
The development of a mobile application for taxis should include the following characteristics:
- API
- Registration
- GPS, maps and routing
- Notifications and communication
- Payments
- Profiles and ratings
The majority of companies use separate apps for passengers and drivers. Let’s look at how we can create a taxi booking app development that is accessible to both taxi passengers as well as car drivers.
API
Do not fool yourself into thinking that the development process begins with creating code for the application. This is true only for basic apps such as calculators. When you create a service, apps are created within it. They’re only the tip of an Iceberg.
The process begins by the description of all possible scenarios of interaction with the service. They can be used for planning and developing an API. Once all the steps to automate your service have been carefully thought through, can we begin the process of developing. With API, it is simple for you to incorporate new client apps regardless of the technology they built on.
This strategy lets you reduce time and resources and allows you to easily scale service later on.
Registration
Your app should be secure and simple to use, so give your users a one-time password registration. This type of registration users simply input their mobile number and receive a randomly generated password which is automatically entered into the input area of the app to help save time and make the process easier. The whole process is completed in just minutes and the user is then registered and is signed in for the remaining time.
It’s extremely useful for taxi services as mobile numbers are the most important feature that we require to communicate with our customers. When using OTP registration, the user must enter the phone number one time from the start and it can be used to send order confirmations as well as notifications and communications with drivers.
Routes, maps, GPS and GPS
GPS is used to identify the your current location on the device. Along with maps and position, users are able to locate their vehicle. If you are looking to calculate time of travel or create routes using routing servers, a routing server is needed.
To monitor the quality of our roads using our application UARoads is available for Android, iPhone and iPad we utilized OpenStreetMap (OSM) because we also picked its database to run our application.
In general, we suggest using native maps that are available on the client’s platform. For instance, Google Maps are a natural option for Android. In this way, you can cut down on costs for development.
Notifications and communications
Taxi app developers can save the users time by allowing the option to select their preferred kind of vehicle or other choices (like cars that permit smoking, or pets to travel). The drivers and passengers or managers must be able to communicate with each other privately via messages or by phone to discuss all details. The ideal is to keep the users’ private data secure. And do it without divulging the numbers of their phones.
In addition, to notify users of important occasions (for instance, if their rental time is about to expire or that their taxi has arrived) Push notifications and SMS are employed. While push notifications are simple to design, for the integration of SMS you’ll need to collaborate with a communication service provider. Uber prefers working with Twilio however, there are other comparable solutions, such as Nexmo and Sinch.
Payments
The ability to charge users for taxis directly via the app is an absolute requirement in the present. Make sure to give your passengers a variety of payment options to suit their needs.
In order to integrate payments such as taxi booking app development, the development firm can make use of services such as Braintree, WorldPay or Stripe. There are plenty of other options out there, including Performa for bank card payments.
Tips are another important factor to consider in the course of car or taxi scheduling mobile apps development. It is possible to allow users to add a gratuity to the value of their trip or give them alternatives for how to accomplish it:
Profiles and ratings
Profiles and ratings are crucial options that let you keep the community vibrant and content. By keeping track of your car and driver ratings, you will be able to spot issues with satisfaction of customers in the very early levels. If you allow drivers to evaluate passengers, you could make this process more beneficial. Here are some examples of Hailo as well as Lyft:
In terms of profiles, you can add as little as you like such as the name, photo and vehicle model for drivers. If you’d like to, add more details and let users add the bio of a person, similar to that in Sidecar:
Examples of the Top Taxi Booking Apps Development
The first thing you’ll think of when having heard about the most effective taxi booking app development is Uber. It has changed the way taxis operate and not just. The word Uberization is now a part of our vocabulary along with the reality of Uber service has influenced many spheres of daily life.
Uber
Within the realm of taxi reservation applications, Uber is the dominant app that is available in more than 70 countries, and more than half one million cities.
Uber app lets users:
- Choose a pickup location,
- Choose from the various cars,
- Check the approximate time of arrival and track your car’s progress as it nears,
- Include your credit or bank card to be used to pay for the trip.
Bolt
Bolt follows Uber in popularity. is an incredibly well-known taxi application located in Estonia and is in operation in more than 25 countries. Latin America, Spain and Portugal are among them.
The number of people who travel is greater than 10 million, with the number of drivers providing them with services. solution allows:
- Make the destination known,
- Be aware of the price of the trip in advance,
- Assess the experience of the ride as well as the rider,
- Pay using the app.
Lyft
Lyft is among the US most popular applications operating in over 700 cities, nine of which are located in Canada. It is famous for its reasonable prices.
One of the best attributes of this app is that the user can
- Take a ride by making tapping the screen
- Follow his car in real-time and view his estimated timing of his arrival.
- Pay from the app directly,
- Ride with highly-rated, professional drivers.
What is the cost to create an app similar to Bolt Lyft as well as Uber?
The main things taxi app developers are worried about when they seek taxi app development solutions are budget and deadlines.
To build an app to book taxis that is both user-friendly and efficient you must develop at least two mobile applications (one for taxi drivers and the other for customers calling the taxi) and an admin panel to oversee the operation that your service provides.
At Soft Suave we typically break down the development process into five phases, and the online taxi booking app development will pass through each of them:
- Phase of Discovery Phase,
- UI/UX design,
- Frontend and
- Backend development,
- QA.
Let’s take a closer look at the procedure.
Discovery Phase
In the initial stage of discovery, the Soft Suave development team sits down with the customer to learn about his requirements and the vision for the product. They also determine what problems potential customers face and what technology can address the issues.
An MVP enables to launch a new solution using the bare minimum of features and to swiftly test both the solution and market.
In subsequent iterations, the solution could be refined and improved.
A discovery phase generally takes about 3 weeks, and the cost is about 2000 USD.
Design Stage
This is where UX as well as UI designers design the app, considering the most important categories of users, possible interfaces and color schemes that are suitable and app usability. as well as animated elements, and lots more.
The development of the visuals for the solution can take up three months, and the cost for this stage is approximately 12,000 USD to create the solution. Its MVP design is a little less than that, which is around 8000 USD.
Frontend as well as Backend of Taxi Booking App Development (Two stages combined)
The most important stage in a taxi booking mobile app development. It is built on the accepted design and selected methodology. It is crucial to select an efficient, secure, and secure structure, and then divide the process into multiple iterations so that the essential functionality as well as all the integrations were created and put into place both on the front and back-end.
The typical cost for this stage is 50000 USD.
Quality Assurance
If you develop your own taxi app , you would like it to run seamlessly and without a hitch. Do you not? As a responsible cab booking app development firm, we test our apps and find any bugs, then fix them, and continue this process until we’re certain that we’ve discovered all the bugs we can. After launching an MVP and allowing users to make a reservation for a taxi using the application they are still able to find issues.
We will always inform our clients about this, and emphasize that it’s a natural thing.
In response to a request from a customer, Soft Suave can additionally assist in submitting apps to Google Play and App Store to speed up time to market.
Another option that may be purchased by customers can be post-launch assistance. Soft Suave continues to enhance and improve the product after its launch.
