When you arrive at San Francisco International Airport and want a ride, the Uber app lets you tell your driver which specific door and terminal you're exiting—some fine-grained tuning for travelers to Uber’s hometown. In Portland and Seattle, Uber has launched a program called UberPEDAL to let cyclists order a car outfitted with a bike rack. In the Philippines, where few people have credit cards, the company allows passengers to pay with cash.
In other words, Uber in your city might not be the same as Uber in someone else's city. Different places have different layouts, rules, infrastructures, people, habits, and needs. That's why, as it pushes to expand its reach in India, Uber did more than just turn on its app. It's already raising millions more to invest in emerging markets. And recently, the company opened an entire engineering hub in Bangalore, India, to figure out how to make Uber fit in a market of a billion people.
The outpost, the first of its kind in Asia, will act as a research and development lab for creating localized features that make Uber make sense in India. A little paradoxically, the company is also hoping that what works in India could then be applied in countries with similar idiosyncrasies—all feeding Uber's appetite for global domination.
"Across engineering," says Pedram Keyani, director of growth and engineering at Uber, "the mandate is to build out a system that can serve the entire world."
Uber has good reason to get more aggressive in India. The ride-hailing giant is still up against a bigger rival in India, the local on-demand rides company Ola, which operates in more than 100 Indian cities and delivers close to one million rides a day. But Uber says it's gaining traction after arriving in India in 2014. At the beginning of 2015, it had still only captured 4 percent of the market. By the end of 2015, that figure had increased ten-fold to 40 percent, Uber says. Today, Uber boasts 250,000 drivers in the country, and India has become the company's third-largest market after the US and China.
Keyani says in the beginning it was a challenge to convince the powers that be at Uber that the company had to make some concessions when it came to the country’s specific needs, like allowing cash payments. “Cash is not that magical experience,” Keyani says, referring to the ease with which customers who've loaded a credit card into the app in, say, the US can just get out of the car without money ever changing hands. Cash, Keyani says, creates friction.
But last May, the company finally broke from its credit card-only tradition to test cash payments in India. It's tricky, because Uber makes money by taking a portion of a driver's fares. In India, the company takes its cut automatically as it normally would so long as a certain percentage of a driver's transactions are still digital. If most of a driver's fares pay cash, Uber collects its cut in person. Needless to say, that's a harder process to scale—exactly the kind of problem the engineers at Bangalore R&D lab are tasked with solving.
Other country-specific solutions that Uber has already rolled out in India include a way to address network connectivity---or rather, the lack of it. Connectivity is known to spotty throughout the country, so Uber's India app uses backend technology that routinely refreshes the fare tally when a ride travels through areas of good mobile network connectivity but can also keep an accurate estimate in areas of low connectivity. This allows a rider or driver to end a ride at any point, even if their phones aren’t connected to a network. They still know how much it's going to cost.
Uber's engineers also built and released an India-specific mobile app for recruiting drivers. Anyone, driver or not, can download the app, Keyani says, and use it to refer new drivers to Uber. When someone successfully brings in a new driver, the recruiter is eligible for a referral bonus. Making driver recruiting easy via app gets around the relative lack of access to PCs and broadband connections, Keyani says. In a similar vein, the engineering team is working on a new process for getting riders signed up with Uber; because of poor mobile infrastructure in many places, potential riders often don’t finish the process.
Uber's engineers will have to work within parameters unique to India---particularly, phone and network limitations. Not everyone has a top-shelf iPhone in the country, and the data-hungry plans we're used to in the US are prohibitively costly for many in India. At the same time, the constraints created by these limitations lend themselves to creative thinking.
In the US, for example, riders compulsively stare at the Uber app to watch a miniaturized car crawl on a map until it reaches them. But for riders in India, that process would consume a horrifying amount of data over slower connections. They might prefer another option, like text updates. “An app is overkill for so many things that we [in the US] do,” says Julie Ask, an analyst with tech research firm Forrester. “We don’t have to optimize as much as [people in India] do.”
Ironically, any scheme that Uber comes up with for a supposedly less state-of-the-art locale could find its way back to the US anyway, Ask says, pointing to apps being developed abroad that US companies are now scrambling to mimic, such as China’s WeChat messaging app. If Uber’s engineering team cracks the problem, Ask says, the Uber we know could end up being a more social and more messaging-oriented service on our phones.
But many cross-cultural issues for Uber go beyond the technical. In India, Uber was rocked by an allegation in late 2014 that a driver raped a female passenger in India, and it faced a months-long ban in the country’s capital, New Delhi. (The ban was later revoked.) Following the incident, the company updated an in-app panic button so riders could beam real-time information directly to local police. Uber says its India-based R&D team will keep working on similar safety features (though it's likely these features won't roll out in the US).
No, Uber isn't alone among US tech companies operating in India that have found engineering alone can't always massage conflict away—the ban on Facebook’s Free Basics service being the most notable recent example. But by putting down roots in India and hiring local engineers, Uber may be hoping to gain a bit of goodwill, contributing to its economy and acting as a “good neighbor” as it seeks to tailor Uber's tech the country's needs. Conveniently, there is a lot of tech talent available in India—for a lot cheaper than the US.
