Uber has reached and surpassed the 50 billion mark within 10 years. The manner in which they have captured the immediate demand of cab riders and transformed their business model is unprecedented. The uniformity in their services across borders and unparalleled standards may have helped them storm the ride-hailing market. Emulating Uber’s well-designed app that has a user-friendly interface and features is paramount. One of the features that your app for sure will need to have is Geolocation Tracking. This feature helps check and understand where the other device is located in real-time which is crucial, especially in the ride-hailing fleet management industry.

Uber, the top ride-hailing business uses this particular feature, and so do other leading companies like Lyft. If you want your ride-hailing app to be trusted with respect to safety, this is something that you need to work on immediately after you have developed a business plan. Ride-hailing businesses can keep track of their drivers, track their performance, ensure that they drive through the scheduled route, and also evaluate the pitfalls in taking certain routes.

Besides helping business owners and customers, the geolocation feature also helps drivers assess a particular route, get street views, obtain traffic analysis data, warn them about diversions in a particular area, etc.

Here is a brief write-up of why this feature is the most important and how you can implement it with ease. 

What Exactly is Geolocation Tracking?

The founders of Uber had clarified before they launched this ride-hailing app that it is going to be a location-based startup. In 2010, the technology was not that advanced. Finding details of location is a lot easier now than it was in the past.

Realtime mapping and geolocation tracking is a core feature of web and mobile apps across every industry. It helps detect and stream location data to a live-updating map to smoothly watch location updates as they change in the real world. With that, Android geolocation tracking is an essential technology today. –source Hackermoon.

A taxi-booking or ride-hailing app depends a lot on geolocation tracking and mapping features to provide the solutions to the unique problems they encounter. Imagine how it can help you to run your business smoothly. Getting a safe and reliable ride is possible only because of this specific feature.

You can enhance services such as navigation, pickups, and customer support when you use this feature for your ride-hailing business. 

Identifying the Location of a Device

Uber app version for iOS utilizes the CoreLocation framework. Determining the geographic location of a device, as well as, providing details of orientation and altitude is something this framework can do.

It also has protocols and classes that one can follow to both schedule and configure location delivery. It also sends location events to the server. Uber was able to define the geographic regions and monitor the movements of a device when it crosses the boundaries using this framework.

Android app for Android uses Google’s location APIs to do geolocation tracking. It provides the same kind of support and details as the CoreLocation framework. 

Provide Directions to the Driver

Tracking the location is one aspect while providing directions to the driver is yet another thing altogether. It is challenging for the drivers to reach out to their clients on time if this feature is absent. Developers that created the iOS version of the Uber App used Mapkits to achieve this thing.

While Android developers for Uber used Google Maps Android API to accomplish this job, after registering their app as a routing app, users of this app can get the route information. You need to do the same with your ride-hailing app so that the drivers can find the location of their clients easily. 

Integrate the App with Mapping Software

Uber implemented Google Maps on their app which is a location-based service for both Android and iOS versions of the app. As a result, Google Maps now provides seamless, anytime integration with Uber.

But, you are wrong if you think that Uber only uses services of Google Maps alone. If your business wants to offer customers a flexible option when it comes to choosing Google Maps or Apple Maps, that needs to be integrated into the Geolocation ecosystem of your app.

Please read our blog on Which Navigation App is better for Your Uber-like Ride-hailing Service? to get a better idea.

In Conclusion 

Of course, apart from this particular feature, Uber uses an array of other features such as payment integration, SMS, and push notifications to enhance the experience of the user. If you are planning to step into ride-hailing business, you should not forget about the geolocation tracking feature which is a boon to the app.