Taxi Booking App Development: Benefits, Cost, Features, Process & Challenges
Taxi Booking App Development: Benefits, Cost, Features, Process & Challenges

Taxi booking app development is one of the most popular ideas for on-demand services. Technology has progressed and is now able to do basic chores of human’s daily life. From map directions to a place, and ordering food from our home, we all like to use a mobile application that can provide greater comfort and affordable services. On-demand business applications like taxi booking and food delivery are meeting new dimensions of success.

Ride-hailing apps are the superior choice when it comes to creating a subtle solution for transportation businesses. Practically in recent years, ride-booking apps have replaced traditional taxi-booking services. In a nutshell, it brings to the conclusion that such apps are here to stay for the long run.

It is very necessary to understand that only car-booking app development is not enough for a business. It must properly understand the market analysis, competitor analysis, brand recognition, and customer gladness.

In this blog, I will be explaining every detail about taxi booking app development that you’d find beneficial for your business or any such idea.

What do I mean by Ride-Hailing App?

Ride-hailing application or taxi-booking application is primarily a mobile application that allows a user to book a cab at an affordable price. The cab will reach the user’s pickup location instantly or at the mentioned time. The ride will start and will end up at the drop-off location where the user can pay the ride fare to the driver.

Traditionally one has to go and ask for a lift from on-duty and free drivers to drop you at a location. Since the world is evolving and adapting new technologies, one in the need of a taxi can book it from a smartphone.

A user requires a smartphone with an internet connection in it. The user will install a taxi-booking application on the phone, enter a pickup and drop-off location, and will wait for the taxi to come to his/her pickup location.

Providing comfortable rides is the whole idea of ride-hailing applications. Yet each application may vary in several aspects like features and functionalities, prices, UI & UX, etc.

Benefits of Creating a Taxi Booking App

Before you invest in taxi-booking application development, you need to ensure that you are aware of the app’s workflow and benefits of this app. Ride-hailing apps have witnessed remarkable growth in recent years and show no sign of slowing down any time soon.

As per Statista report, the taxi booking app market in 2017 registered its market value of $36,000 million which is projected to grow at a CAGR of 16.5 percent till 2025 recording a value of up to $126,521 million.

Seeing the huge growth of statistics, no one can deny investing in mobile app development for the ride-hailing business.

If you already own a taxi business, you can get the following benefits by developing a taxi-booking app.

a. You can keep track of each taxi with GPS location.

b. Your driver doesn’t have to wait or look for trips by running the vehicle empty around the city. Your driver will get the notification as soon as she needs a taxi near your location.

c. Taxi app will help your business in growing revenue and customer satisfaction rate.

d. Get full access to track booking history and canceled trips.

e. Drivers can know the exact location of their passengers and can avoid wasting time while searching for their passengers.

f. Based on customer data, you can launch personalized offers or discounts and make smart suggestions to move intelligently with the business.

g. User activity analysis can help you track the most and least popular services or campaigns. You can gather valuable insights by analyzing behavioral patterns.

h. On-demand mobile app development is a trend to strengthen the business presence and can help in expanding the business to multiple nationalities.

i. Revenue increment is obvious to businesses as on-demand mobile app development is based on theory to encourage repetitive trips and invite new trips through loyalty programs, discount campaigns, etc.

Taxi-Booking Mobile App Business Models

Now that you are aware of the benefits of a ride-hailing app, you can realize the power of mobile apps for a business. There are two types of business models for on-demand cab booking applications:

1. Dedicated Taxi Booking App:

These applications are for existing taxi businesses or for a person who owns numerous cars and wants to start a ride-hailing business. If you are one of them, all you have to do is to find a well-established mobile app development company to build a subtle and scalable app for business. App launching and promotion are required to build a strong user base. Businesses that have existing customers have to find new customers through the app while maintaining connections with existing customers.

Taxi owners are free to customize the app features based on the services they offer.

2. Aggregator Taxi Booking App:

These applications work like a platform where customers find cabs and taxi owners find customers. Many taxi companies and personal taxis register on such platforms to complete plenty of trips each day. Uber and Ola are examples of this business model.

Such apps allow taxi companies, personal taxis, or personal cars to register under their name. The user will input the pickup and drop-off location and a free driver within minimum reach will accept the trip. The fare will be calculated when the trip is over and users can pay at their own convenience.

Cost Associated with Ride-Hailing Mobile App Development:

The cost associated with cab booking mobile app development depends on several factors. It includes features, the number of devices to be supported, platform preferences, and the level of customization.

Moreover, a taxi booking app with minimum viable features sets a cost between $20,000 to $40,000. It increases in the same way the features and other customizations increase. An advanced app for ride-booking can cost you as much as or more than $60,000.

The most critical factor in determining the app cost are features that you want to provide your users. The platform preference, if you want to build an app for Android or iOS or both, also impacts the cost associated with the app development for taxi business. Here is our free guide on the average cost breakdown for app development that you can use to take price estimations and to understand how all factors impact the total cost.

However, a taxi app with features like user requesting a ride, and tracking the driver’s or user’s location is not going to cost you as much as an app with advanced features like multiple payment options, splitting bills, estimated arrival time, and real-time chat will.

Along with a mobile app, you may need to develop a web-based version of your app/business. Web design & development cost also varies on the features you want to include.

The location where app development team resides also influences the cost. A mobile app development company in USA will charge higher than an IT outsourcing company in India. You should consider hiring skilled app developers to ensure that high-quality work is being served.

Get an accurate cost breakdown by consulting any app development company, but the following insights can also help you a bit to calculate cost estimation.

Ratelist

Technologies Used to Build a Taxi-Booking App

While we all acknowledge and celebrate the success of an on-demand app, it’s important to identify the technology stack to ensure the viability of the business model.

The implementation of the code must be practical. It is responsible for app’s right functioning with associated performance. The essential components of the app must be categorized properly. It helps assign adequate time to each part of the app and the process of taxi booking app development becomes easier.

Based on the market and target user analysis, you can create the app for Android, iOS, or both. Your app will need the following third-party services to create an app like uber:

a. Google map

b. Google search

c. Payment gateway

d. Notification

e. Firebase

Along with these services’ implementation, the below technologies will be primary choice for a taxi app.

Payment Google Pay, PayPal’s Card.io
Hybrid cloud model Terraform
Analytics for distributed storage and complex data Hadoop
Cached data and queued data Redis with Twemproxy & Celery workers
Crunching data streams Storm and Spark
Web standards for graphics and visualization SVG, Canvas 2D, and WebGL.
web front-end applications JavaScript
To build data products JavaScript and React
Frameworks and libraries React+Flux, D3, and Mapbox
Streaming data Kafka
VMs Packer, Vagrant, Boto, and Unison
Safety Configuration Puppet
Inventory management Clusto
Various programming languages Go, Java, C, C++, Python, and Node.js
Rendering, state handling, and building React.js, Standard flux, Gulp.js, Browserify
Apple iOS Objective C and Swift
On Android Java
Monitoring alerts Nagios
Web server Express.js
App provisioning Docker, Mesos, Aurora
Service Discovery and Routing HAProxy, Ringpop, TChannel, and HyperBahn
Front-end web server NGINX
Interface definition languages Thrift and Protobuf
Development and deployment Phabricator, OpenGrok, Jenkins
For building, managing, and developing virtual  machines Packer, Vagrant, Boto, and Unison
Managing system configuration Puppet
Documentation Sphinx
Searching and visualizing Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana
Additional PostgreSQL, Riak, Cassandra, Hive, MapReduce, HDFS, Elasticsearch

Dominant Features of a Taxi Booking App:

A typical taxi app consists of three main panels: driver, passenger, and admin. It is highly recommended to build a native taxi app to ensure better performance, improved scalability, and greater security. Native mobile app development allows advanced customization and instant app update release. However, hybrid apps cost less than native apps and take less development time.

If you have any confusion about what to choose native or hybrid, consult with our app developers here:

The core features that you would want in your taxi app are:

Passenger App Features Driver App Features  Admin Panel Functionality
Login & Registration Registration Secure Login
View Profile Driver Profile & Status Location & Fare Management
Taxi Booking Trip Alerts & Information Driver and Passenger Management
Fare Calculation Route Tracking & Navigation Vehicle Management
Payment Passengers Review & ratings Booking Management
Push Notifications Receive & Track Earnings Check Ratings & Reviews
Driver’s Ratings & Review Booking Cancelation Notification Management
Messaging System Messaging System Integration with Google Analytics
Ride History Push Notifications Review Driver’s order & Payoff
SOS Button For Customer Support Driver Delivery Reports CMS management and FAQ
Pickup location Driver destinations Manage dispatchers
Ride cancellation Quest earnings You can also build a successful brand is patcher panel
Split payment Waiting time Manage refunds
Interactive map Heat maps Promotion and discount management
Future ride Forward dispatch SMS alert settings for specific trips
Book for someone else Future ride settings
Favorite locations Country and currency settings
Gamification, discounts, referral rewards Heat map
Voice recognition Surge pricing
Waiting list Flat pricing
Hidden passenger phone number

Process of Ride-Hailing Mobile App Development:

To create a ride-hailing app, you basically have two choices:

  1. Invest in hiring and managing an internal team
  2. Hiring a team of experts from a mobile app development company

There’s a good probability here that as a taxi company, you will not prefer to invest your money into hiring an internal team of designers, developers, Project managers, testers, etc. You will have to spend a lot of time, effort, and money if you go with the first option.

However, if you hire a well-established mobile app development company, you can actually save pretty much everything. You won’t need to spend your time hiring and managing the in-house team, you won’t need to make any effort to keep everything under control, and also, you can save up your money as the app development companies in India offer very affordable prices. As a result, you get a trustworthy partner to accomplish your ideas.

Here’s a well-documented guide on the process of developing a cab-booking app:

1. Hire a Development Team:

Your first step should focus on hiring a reputed and trustworthy app development company. This step is most crucial as the success of your application relies on it. Do check the previous projects of the company you are going to hire. Read our guide on how to choose a foremost app development company and focus on choosing the best for your business.

2. Establish the Niche, Audience, and Market Analysis:

The hired team will evaluate your business requirements and vision of the project. A detailed market analysis will be done by the team itself. Targeted audience, niche, market, and location go hand-in-hand. If anything is not well-researched, important things may miss out.

3. Create an MVP:

MVP(minimum viable product) is what will show you the future of your application. It is a simplified version with the bare minimum features of a taxi app. You can also start raising funding for your business with MVP.

4. Design & Develop:

The next step is to design and develop the application with an adequate technology stack. Focus on bringing out the user experience that customer demands. A scalable, fast, and responsive application demands a good time for design and development phase. Many challenges may fall at this point as some code may not work according to requirements and then the developer needs to recode the task.

5. Test, Launch & Promote:

Once the app is developed, different techniques to test its functioning are performed to ensure that the app is working as demanded. Prepare a pre-launch market strategy and kick off your app at the play store or app store at the right time. After launching the application, you will need to promote the application. Your business will get multi-dimensional exposure after a good and strategic promotion.

Wrapping Up:

An app development process is demanding and difficult but proper guidance and strategy make the process easier and time-effective. Every business needs to be digital these days to meet a well-defined success.

If you also have a similar idea or business, we’ll be delighted to have a conversation with you. We deliver solutions that are second to none. Drop your business requirements or inquiries at info@chawtechsolutions.com and we will be in touch with you at the earliest.

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