Open-Source Taxi App

The goal of this research is to determine:

• Issues with current taxi apps and business models
• what open-source taxi app alternatives exist, to what extent they have been successful and if not, the reasons for not achieving success and the challenges they have faced
• what it would take to make such an initiative successful from a technical, legal, human resources and operational perspective
• if we should take an existing solution and modify it, or develop from scratch

Corporate Business Models and their Issues

According to this website, there are 300 million users of taxi apps with Uber and DiDi responsible for 150 million of those users. The taxi app market size is expected to be $283 billion by 2028. Often these apps take a large portion of the fare (a lot of information is available for this for example [1], [2], [3]). Some taxi companies take a smaller commission e.g. DiDi takes about 20% (source), compared to Uber and Lyft's 40 to 60% (source) and this shows its possible to take less commission. Many people believe that open-source taxi apps with more transparent, fair and lean business models should exist with minimum fees that are fully and available for examination/audit. Many have wondered and inquired if such apps exist ([1], [2] etc).

It doesn't seem like there are any open-source business models that have been successful. Various projects exist on Github but there's no real-world execution/follow-up and user adoption which is understood. A successful widely adopted taxi app requires more than just a working taxi app.

LibreTaxi

The most famous open-source taxi app LibreTaxi is actually not an app. Its a Telegram service (user needs to have the Telegram messaging app). A taxi app should be easy to use/intuitive (working through a messaging/chat interface to get a taxi ride is not intuitive). Its also not clear if LibreTaxi has been successful in user adoption although it deserves support as its a free open-source project. Here's an interview with the developer

Notable Alternatives

• Wridz - lets the driver keep 100% of the fare and tips but charges the driver a variable subscription fee (e.g. $25 to $100/month). Gaining gradual adoption in big cities but there's no open-source code and its a regular corporate entity (not community owned)

Misc Links

• (interesting mix of cooperative and carpooling; check for possible ideas/inspirations) "Mobicoop is a cooperative society that offers carpooling, fleet management, hitchhiking, and solidarity mobility services." Google app description says "An open source solution of carpooling. Free service for the users, we don't take any commission, you only pay the price to driver. Carpooling for short and long distance, for events and company communities. We are a cooperativ, you can join the project by taking a share."
• [research] A systematic literature review of ride-sharing platforms, user factors and barriers (2021)
• MIT study shows how much driving for Uber or Lyft sucks (2018)

Next Steps

The next step is to examine any existing source code and use that or start from scratch. Someone wrote a development guide.

From previous edits/page

Links

Source Code

• [Defunct] Ride Austin - "nonprofit rideshare service created by the Austin community." See comments here on Reddit - Github Source code

• Flutterbase taxi: https://github.com/YakivGalkin/flutterbase-taxi (related article by author)
• libreapp (github); main websites seem to have gone down
• https://libretaxi.org/ (cash only) - Source code
• Saffar taxi app: https://github.com/Saffar-Org/saffar_app (article)

Misc:

• Related Apps on Github: https://github.com/topics/ridesharing
• drife.io - "Decentralizing Ride-hailing Experience" (no commission but source code isnt available)

To do

• open source taxi site:reddit.com
  • names of any existing open-source apps
  • Read people's opinions, copy paste important stuff, challenges faced etc

We need to start a unit for the Javul Transport Service App which will be Javul certified. This can be used for multiple situations. Uber's CEO has a net worth of $6.3 billion. Drivers do not want to use businesses that take 20-30% of their hard-earned money. If successful, this initiative will be a very good example of what people can do using Javul. The goal will be to show that it is possible to create a successful organization with these characteristics:

1. Complete commitment to customer satisfaction (both employees and users of the service are considered to be customers)
2. Let customers make high-level and low-level decisions for the company as a group so there is no need of high-paid executives and CEOs
3. Let employees retain the money that they earned using their own hard work. Use code from open-source Taxi app libretaxi (first check if we can improve this project or if we have to create our own project based on this app)

Steps:

• Do survey of existing open-source and commercial transport and taxi apps (ride-share, food delivery, package delivery)
• Do a survey of existing initiatives for apps like this
• Start the project. If possible, use LibreTaxi source code as a base