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I formerly worked at Uber. I’m surprised that Bolt blocks the web app from working. Uber also built a web app which is incredibly lightweight - here’s a summary on how it was built [1]. It’s a life saver especially if e.g. at an airport and you pay for data over roaming. Uber doesn’t exactly advertise m.uber.com, but there’s no blocking of it. My suspect is that Bold wants you to use their app as they can eg send pus…
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At the end you talk about having laws passed. What sort of law do you want passed exactly (and do you mean EU, specific EU countries, US, elsewhere)?
I guess one thing could be to force businesses of certain scale (or ideally, of any scale) to not offer services exclusive to a particular digital ecosystem, unless that's the only way to provide that service. My local restaurant uses an app to do loyalty stamps... I really wish tey would come back to the traditional paper-based ones
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Not really, it is sort of a monopoly. The only competitor app we had was Yandex Taxi, but ever since the war we don't have it here anymore.
Did Uber exit the market in the region completely?
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You say unverified, but I’m pretty sure there’s lots of verification for this. Obviously it will depend on the service or app, but it’s a well known trend. At my previous job our app had much higher retention than our web product, despite the web product being much more mature, modern, and feature rich. We verified this across multiple marketing channels, and looked at long term user retention over years.
Could it be that the mobile interface was simply better in terms of speed, usability, smoothness of the UX? Complex web apps honestly often look and feel shite in the browser.
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You say unverified, but I’m pretty sure there’s lots of verification for this. Obviously it will depend on the service or app, but it’s a well known trend. At my previous job our app had much higher retention than our web product, despite the web product being much more mature, modern, and feature rich. We verified this across multiple marketing channels, and looked at long term user retention over years.
How do you know that people use the app because they are already highly committed to the service, rather than the other way around? IE, the whole thing is a selection effect?
We certainly did encourage users acquired on the web to download the app, and the fact that those who did were retained longer could have been a selection effect, but I don't think this accounts for users who never saw the other platform.
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Not really, it is sort of a monopoly. The only competitor app we had was Yandex Taxi, but ever since the war we don't have it here anymore.
Did Uber exit the market in the region completely?
Uber entered Estonia quite early and did its classic market share grab where it completely dominated. However they quickly lost that market share to Bolt (in a period of a few years, and even before it was called Bolt - it was Taxify back then) because of local market understanding and more concentrated marketing/advertising. Nowadays Uber still "works", but you have to wait 20 minutes for a car, compared to 2 minutes with Bolt. I get a sense that a good chunk of Uber drivers are banned from Bolt, but this is just a hunch based on the Uber drivers accepting low fee rides during surge pricing on Bolt.
This reminds me of Reddit's approach to mobile. They make their mobile web interface excruciating to use, and block features client side just to push you onto their app. I'm guessing it has to do with mobile users being more lucrative?
1) GPS tracking. They want to know where you are at all times. The app makes this tracking easier than a webpage.
2) Upselling. The Bolt app has front and center upselling to their car rental service, their scooter rental service, and their food delivery service. All these services share the same account and payment info too. -- Do these exist in the web version? I don't see them on the screenshots. These upsells can be implemented on the web too of course, but that probably hasn't happened as it requires web apps for those services too.
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Did Uber exit the market in the region completely?
For what it's worth Uber is still in the neighboring Estonia, which is also the headquarters of Bolt. Uber entered Estonia quite early and did its classic market share grab where it completely dominated. However they quickly lost that market share to Bolt (in a period of a few years, and even before it was called Bolt - it was Taxify back then) because of local market understanding and more concentrated marketing/adv…
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I really can't understand why Reddit is pushing the app so hard. I mean, keep that as an option, but why creating an awful UX for the mobile web users? You gather more data but the product is worse, less users are staying and you're losing value at the end...
Easy, harder for users to block the ads in apps. Apple / Google should allow add blockers for the entire OS.