Tarun Nagar Over the last decade, taxi development applications have been a highly competitive niche in the market of technology and science. Taxi booking application has made people able to book taxis, cabs, etc in a seamless manner according to their preference, number of passengers and cost. In the blog, you will get the full taxi app development guide.
This not only has given economic liberty to the travelers but also has provided employment to a huge number of people. After companies like Uber, Ola, careem, etc have brought this revolution, many other businesses have also started thinking about investing in ride-hailing mobile app development and adopting the same business to attain a profitable revenue in the market of on demand taxi app development
There are many things that come into play when any company wills to develop something like that. There may be many complications that need to be discussed and dealt with regarding various application features as well as operating systems.
Other information such as duration required for the development of such an app, resources required to build them, interesting features that must be added in order to stand out in the competition of similar applications.
Additionally, it is mandatory to discuss the kinds of traits that can help to intensify the reach as well as the growth of the app. With the help of innovative coding and cool features, one can definitely take his/her business to new levels.
As per reports, the revenues related to taxi solutions are expected to reach more than 2.81 billion dollars. It is a great opportunity to flourish in business with new ideas and strategies.
Why We Need Taxi Booking Mobile App
There is a basic format that should be followed before developing any kind of application, the first thing should be knowing why is that application needed, what purpose does it serve to its customers or clients.
Before developing a taxi booking application, the developers should know the reason and the requirements of the project. Is the application based on providing benefits to the users or to the vehicle owners? Today around the world, taxi booking applications have become very important and the reason is the need for people to travel from one place to another.
- The taxi application serves their customer/passengers with the power to book a taxi on anytime they want, with a fare that is in their budget and is shown beforehand.
- The normal taxies can ignore the passenger’s request but the taxi booking applications offer them more probability in the same or sometimes even less fare than a standing taxi. Applications like Ola and Uber have created a market that can’t be broken in the years to come, everyone has their application installed as they provide the facility of booking a taxi even in small towns at most times of the day.
- The taxi booking applications provide the “share the ride details” feature that helps the passengers share the details of the taxi, the taxi driver and their live location that adds up to their security. There are many such points that can be counted when the question “Why we need taxi booking mobile app?”
- In all types of cities, the need for a taxi booking application has increased due to the increased traffic, people prefer taking a taxi to work or to market instead of driving on their own in traffic.
- Sharing taxies have become even more popular because they are pocket-friendly too. People find safe, comfortable, and fast sharing rides to any place they want.
- Some taxi apps have even launched bike taxi’s for single passengers who want to reach any destination fast and don’t have too much luggage, this option saves them a lot of money too.
Without a taxi booking application, the day to day life will become hard for many people, especially the working class and students. Taxi booking apps have become an important part of life and they are continuously improving and innovating.
How Your Taxi Booking Mobile App Compete With Others In The Market?
Mobile app development along with exceptional features are not sufficient to take the business to successful heights in the market. There are so many other factors required in the app to compete with others in the market.
Their factors include a thorough assessment, analyzing as well as optimizing the application before, during and after the software development of that specific service.
In addition to that, planning, prioritizing and accommodating the resources suitable to the objectives of the service is also important. In other words, it can be said that with the employment of the right strategies, one can establish their business and make it unique in front of the customers.
As far as on-demand taxi app development is concerned these are a list of points that needs to be considered very carefully to make a reputed place in the market.
- Commission charges
- Assessment of the region
- Entering an established market
- Customer engagement
Commission charges
This point plays a huge role in the rise and fall of any company. Imposing high commission charges can lead to discouraging the drivers who wish to partner with the business.
Before starting the business, one must learn about the process of establishment of fees so that the whole process will work in the company’s favor without harming or exploiting its employees including the drivers. By charging a little less than the competitors, one can establish a stable and reputed business.
Assessment of the region
It is mandatory to learn about the demographics of the region one wished to launch its platform business. A major way to stand out in this business and gain maximum drivers is to establish the business in those areas where unemployment is prevalent.
Also, the company must focus on those areas where there are a lot of transportation hurdles in order to meet the people’s demands and requirements of an easy, cost-efficient and seamless transportation facility.
Entering an established market
Entering an established market with fresh offers, exciting vouchers, and new marketing ideas can help the company to become popular among common people.
This will help to engage potential customers and help them to identify new potential customers in the operational area. These markets can also prove to be less risky and thus has a large room for experiments and effective marketing.
Customer engagement
It is an important part of any business. One has to keep its customers engaged in order to get success in the market. It can be done using social media marketing, providing knowledge of offers and discounts through notifications and SMSs, creating interesting and interactive pages on various social media handles and so on.
List of Features To Be Included In Taxi Booking Mobile App
Mobile app development company are playing a vital role in catering to this ever-evolving technology needs of new-age smartphone users. Taxi app development is one such area of specialization that involves drivers and passengers, engaging on the interactive platform of taxi apps for their needs.
Generally, a taxi app has three types of users: admins, drivers, and riders. Let’s consider the core features each user requires. These are the features that are necessary for a minimum viable product (MVP).
Key features in the user’s app
- Estimate fare
- Notifications
- Ratings and Reviews
- History of trips
- Support and help for the passengers
- Driver’s contact details
- Booking a ride
- Multiple methods of payment
Estimate fare
A feature that can indicate the estimated fare of the trip should be included, this will help the passenger decide if they want to book the ride for the indicated amount or not. They can also opt for another option, without this if the ride ends and the amount that is charged is higher than what they expected, it would be bad for the relationship of that person with the application.
Notifications
The notifications feature is important as it helps the users know about the new updates and offers in the application.
Ratings and Reviews
The users can rate and review the drivers, this will make sure that the drivers do their job nicely as only those drivers will get a ride whose ratings are high and the ones with low ratings can see their bookings get canceled within seconds.
History of trips
This feature lets the users check their booking history.
Support and help for the passenger
There are situations when the user might face some problems, regarding the application interface, or some transaction, or maybe booking a ride. This feature is important to clear out their doubts and solve their issues.
Driver’s contact details
This is an integral part of the passenger’s security. It displays the contact information of the driver including photo, phone number, and a few relevant information about him/her.
Booking a ride
This is the feature through which the whole application runs. It allows travelers to book rides.
Multiple methods of payment
For the ease of the user, there are many methods of payment such as online wallets, UPI, debit/credit cards or cash.
Key features in the driver’s app
- Dashboard
- Requests for rides
- Rating of customers
- Start/End Trip
- Earning Tracker
- Passengers Contact details
- Accepting/Rejecting a ride
Dashboard
Dashboard for the driver is a must for an in Driver’s app. In this area, all the relevant information along with location details, money earned, ratings, etc is present to help the drivers with their queries.
Requests for rides
This is, in fact, the most basic feature of the taxi application development. This option can be used to provide taxi services whenever and wherever needed. With the help of this option, drivers can accept the ride requests coming for them.
Rating of customers
This is indeed a prior part of the relationship established between the customers, drivers as well as the company. It greatly affects the ratings of customers and their future rides. The rating of customers gives the driver the power to share their feedback about how did they experience, which in turn, helps the company and their employees to grow.
Start/End Trip
The In Driver’s app also consists of the time, area and other information about the beginning and end of the trip. This option is embedded with Google maps so that the driver may get help about the directions and places to go.
Earning Tracker
This is an important part of the dashboard. The daily, weekly, and monthly tracking of the total money earned can be shown here. This can prove very beneficial to the drivers in keeping a record of their total salary. This will also motivate drivers to earn more and provide better services.
Passengers Contact details
This is, in fact, the most important feature as per the security
Accepting/Rejecting a ride
This option helps the drivers the freedom to make the decision whether they want a particular ride or not. This helps them to choose a ride according to their preferences and suitable route. This also helps in fast pick up and drop off passengers.
How To Create a Taxi Booking Mobile Application
For the purpose of taxi application development, you and your team can take the help of the following information and follow the below-mentioned suggestions.
- Technical Aspects
- Documentation
- Creation
- Deployment
- Post-deployment Technical support
Technical aspects of taxi booking app
- Evaluation of the purpose behind the idea of the application development, analysis of the market for future endeavors and opportunities as well as perspectives for income generation.
- Gathering the requirements for the development of such a mobile application and scope for any sort of improvements along with investigating new and better ways that would help in the creation of the application.
- Determine and develop the scope of work and outline of the project.
- Setting a realistic budget for the app MVP. Finalizing a pragmatic and sensible budget for the MVP of the app.
Documentation of taxi booking app
- Creating a comprehensive technical blueprint of the application’s functionality, the architecture of it, and the technical stack that will be used.
- Outline and determine the requirements of the project. This will include both functional as well as non-functional aspects. The former will give a description of the product behavior and will determine its functions and features. The latter will acquire basic and usual characteristics or traits.
- Then, the team shares these documents with stakeholders. This complete documentation of the outlining of the project is shared with the stakeholders for improvements. Once the improvements have been made by the stakeholders, the team will head on to the next level of development of the taxi booking mobile application.
Creation of a taxi booking app
- Distribution of every project into numerous distinct tasks.
- Carry out the initiation of the distributed tasks according to their order of priority.
- Finally, developers will administer the unit testing in order to locate all the logical errors if there are any.
- Afterward, the app is moved to the testing stage.
- When all the steps or procedures mentioned above are performed and give successful results the app is moved to the next level.
Deployment of taxi booking app
- Developers of the taxi booking mobile application, deploy it to the active surroundings. This is done to ensure that the application runs smoothly and properly on all the devices.
- The application is deployed to platforms from where users can download it easily, such as Google play, or the app stores, etc.
Post-deployment Technical support of taxi booking app
- Usually, errors occur in the application a few days after its launch.
- Developers also make additions to the application for enhancement and to make it more efficient.
- New versions could be released to support different operating systems such as Android iOS, etc.
How Much Does It Cost To Make a Taxi Booking Mobile App
The process starts with MVP that is the minimum viable product. This includes both the aspects of demand and supply as well as the dashboard, although not with the entire range of functionality.
This can be better understood with the help of the most famous example of the on-demand taxi app development Uber. In the beginning, Uber did not provide any sort of gamification traits or split up the cost. But the driver and passengers were able to connect with each other and carry out the transaction with the help of the application only.
Once the first version has been bought into the market, the strength of the idea behind this can be tested along with market facilities. Then the developers can add more features to it accordingly.
The cost of the development and creation of a taxi booking mobile app depends on a number of factors as well as features that will be implemented.
Yet there is a defined set of essential parameters and time that are needed for each and every work scope. This predefined set can be taken in stride to do the possible calculation in the beginning. The details given below show the estimated time required for taxi app development :
- Maps/location
- Payments
- Log in setup and Profile maintenance
- Communication
- The algorithm for calculating the cost
Maps/location
This will include integrations such as Google Maps to aid GPS direction, a Mapkit to run in iOS-based devices as well as location APIs for the Android framework. The estimated time for the development of geolocation is 32 hours, creating the aspects for a ride might take somewhere around 35 hours and the aspects for tracking a ride could take 73 hours.
Payments
The next most important feature is the payment system. It will include Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, Google, etc. The time needs to spend on the integration of the payment could take 60 hours, addition and scanning of the card feature can take 40 hours, and getting the price may consume 14 hours.
Log in setup and Profile maintenance
This will include Facebook, phone number, email, etc. The time consumption can take place as; signing in/ signing out – 8 hours, registration or authorization through social media platforms – 8 hours, registration and authorization through emails – 18 hours, registration and authorization with the help of phone numbers – 32 hours and finally proof editing can take up to 47 hours.
Communication
This feature will inculcate things like push notification services for devices based on iOS, messaging service of Google cloud for the users of android, and SMS notification. Development of Push notification can take 40 hours and the integration time for SMS can take 30 hours.
The algorithm for calculating the cost
This is about calculating the cost of the ride according to the time taken and the miles driven. This one big thing or the most important feature can take more than 300 hours.
The features mentioned above are the most basic ones and will take up a total of more than 737 hours. Apart from these many other features are added by taxi app developers for the convenience of the customer or passenger and the driver. These additional features will take up extra time depending on their complexity to develop. Other factors that increase the cost are:
- Managers for quality assurance
- The business analysts
- The project managers
The three factors mentioned above increases the cost of development by almost 20-30%. We discussed the cost of the time that will be required. Now the actual price that will be spent on the development of a taxi booking mobile application will vary according to the company which is developing the application. According to the statistics done earlier, the rate varies as per the location. Statistics show the following estimations:
- North America: $60-250 per hour
- Western Europe: $60-150 per hour
- India: $10-80 per hour
- United Kingdom: $60-150 per hour
- Eastern Europe: $20-100 per hour
Conclusion
Now the time is, to sum up, everything discussed above, the development and creation of a taxi booking mobile application. One thing to note is that despite the fact that an enormous amount of shares of the taxi booking application market is owned by Uber along with its vigorous expansion strategy, the scope for improvement and innovation is still present in it.
So with the help of this guide, you can develop and create a taxi booking mobile application with an iconic and unique touch. You can do this by finding your niche and then applying a profitable and beneficial monetization strategy.
You do not need to adopt the already existing features apart from the basic and most important ones. Creating your own set of those will make your taxi booking mobile application stand out from the rest. And also building and creating a minimum viable product has always been found to be beneficial and so it will be for you as well. It is time for you to start your application development now.
