Just about few years earlier when any person wanted to travel from a certain point A to a point B, that person would had to call a taxi service company to order a car, the car would arrive after quite some time and even then you would have no guarantee about your ride or your driver. But gone are these days because Uber was here to save the day.

Now you can send a request for a car and the nearest Uber car will pick you up in minutes. Uber can to the market with extraordinary levels of customer service. There is no need to explain how this app works because even a child knows how to use Uber because of its friendly user interface. And just like that a lot of apps working on the concept of Uber flooded the market to repeat or supersede the success of Uber.

In this article we will see how you can make an app similar to Uber, Careem, Lyft or Ola and the pricing of these business applications.

Usually when some one starts making a taxi-booking app they want to work on app with standard functionality. And more than 90% times they want to make an app just like Uber. However, this comes forward as no surprise because since Uber was launched in 2012 it has been able to attract more then 75 million users worldwide. Topping that Uber has made a staggering $11.5 billion in revenue and investments. Lets look on the key stages of creating an app with the same functionality as that of Uber.

How do you make a progressive web app?

Step 1: Market Research

This is the most important step in any startup, you can never succeed in a competitive business if you are not aware of what are the new trends in the market. Plenty of applications that wanted to be ”The Next Uber” failed only because they weren’t properly familiar about the market trends. Now, for this step, you will be needing a team of researchers that perform their own research as well as analyze data from similar researches done by other companies around the globe to come up with winning strategies and features for your application to be a success. This is an important step and usually takes about 120-150 hours of work.

Step 2: Design

As you want your applications to use by as many people as possible and that includes a variety of customers so you want your application’s design to be as simple and primitive as possible so that customers of every age and understanding can work with the app easily. This step is done by designers and developers and usually 90-100 Hours.

Step 3: Front end development

This is the most important step in development of any application or website. As the name suggests it deals with all the functionality that the user is going to see directly in the app so this needs to be understandable and elegant. This is by far the most time consuming and costly step in the production of the app. So, let’s break this down further into the technologies and tools that help you in developing the front end of this application.

• Location Services:  Developers use Google APIs for this process. Google Places API is used for Android whereas CoreLocation is used for app in iOS. This feature is implemented quickly sometimes within 10-20 hours.
• Timer:  A timer function is needed in the app that calculates time of arrival, waiting time. This feature is custom built and can take up to 40-50 hours.
• Online Payments:  In addition to the hand to hand cash exchange between customer and driver, it is always better for the app to have alternate online payment methods. To provide the customers the opportunity to pay for the ride with a credit card, you can either make your own payment system of exchanging payments securely or you can integrate an already made payment system of this type.
• User Profiles:  You will be needing three types of user-profiles in this kind of apps. An Admin profile, a customer profile and a Driver’s profile. Admin profile will be for the admin to make any kinds of changes or to review data. Other than that, both the profiles will have main fields that the user will have to fill out. A very easy and efficient method is to include social sign-ups that give you all the information about the user directly.
• Rating and user Review System:  One of the most important step in achieving success in any business and communication so that will have an integrated rating and review system where every driver profile will have a rating given to it by previous users and any user can give a review about the ride he just had.

Few other features that are not necessary but can be useful features of your app are

• Online Chat
• In-app calls
• Multi language support
• Monetization tools

If are making an Uber clone app general understanding is that you will be making an application that will work on both android and iOS platform. That means you can multiply are of your working hours and expenditures by two. If you are unable to generate funding or time for this, you can always choose a cross-platform app development.

Step 4: Back-End Development

This is the core step in production. It deals with the back-end knowledge of how your app will run and respond in different scenarios. From a business point of view, you will like your app to target as much audience as possible, so your backend has to be thorough. Developers will choose the platform on which they want to create the back-end logic of the app. Also, for the application, this big the developers will have to divide the work between different servers. This is a timely process and will take anywhere between 400-500 hours.

Using JavaScript and Python the developers will build the app back-end core and then link it to the app’s User Interface. There will be a backend database working to store data. You can use a database like PostgreSQL. Below is the main architecture of the backend of the app.

Step 5: User Testing

This step comes after all the development of the app is done and all the functionality has been added. Now it is time for you to give your app to select few and see their response. This step is called user testing and it happens before you fully launch your application to see if the small number of testers that use its bets version are satisfied with it. After you remove you bugs identified by testers you can launch your app.

Play store for android provides a feature in which you can tell whether your app is in alpha or beta testing and then only testers will be able to download and use it. App Store for iOS does not provide this feature.

Step 6: launch

When you make an application like Uber you need to promote it so that more and more user knows about the app. Most mobile apps have advanced AI algorithms to promote their apps throughout the market. Your goal should be to get to the top of the search bar. And the way to do that is to get your app downloaded as much as possible as quickly as possible. That is why many app developers go to professional business marketers because without marketing making your way to the top is extremely difficult. Your marketing budgets can vary dependent upon the marketing plan that you choose.

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How much does it cost to create an app like Uber?

It is clear that making an Uber clone is going to be very costly. You cannot put an exact price tag. It can very depend upon the optional features that you add.

• If we look at the most basic version of the app that will include MVP features and User Interface, we are looking at a price tag of about $7500. There is very little need for support and maintenance in this case
• If we add some advanced features to already present basic features. The price can up to $15,000. The support and maintenance cost increase will increase of features.
• An application just like uber will all the functionality and advanced features can cost up to $40,000