There is a PR explosion of these stories at the moment (e.g. [1]). So I thought I'd give it a try here in Singapore. Neither Mobike nor Ofo were installable on

There is a PR explosion of these stories at the moment (e.g. [1]). So I thought I'd give it a try here in Singapore. Neither Mobike nor Ofo were installable on my Xiaomi ("not available in your market" - maybe they should have unlocked the app before the press release!), so I went with the "local" option of Obike (actually a HK outfit). The interesting part were rules clearly designed to curb certain undesirable behaviour. You get docked points for things like parking the bike somewhere private, and losing half your initial points increases the 15 minute rate from $0.5 to $50. You gain points for rides and reporting broken or missing bikes. The first 7 bike locations I checked had no bikes (including 2 locations sandwiched between 4 universities). I reported the last 5 and heard nothing from customer service (also, did not earn any points). I decided to try clusters instead and lo and behold, finally some bikes. The rest worked fine as expected, presumably because it does not involve humans, although my parked bike had moved 137m when I checked the map 5 minutes later - clearly there are teething tracking issues. It seems that people are taking the bikes home and not getting penalised for it, perhaps due to a desire for higher usage numbers for investors. Absent customer service also indicates a swamped team. Someone on Facebook pointed out that the Ofo bikes use a number code which does not change, and some users claimed to have taken the Ofo home after their first ride and used it for free thereafter. Still, this is a great idea which works relatively well. I wish the best to these companies. [1] http://www.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/2080837/chinas-mobike-takes-ofo-singapore-bike-sharing-competition-heats http://www.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/2080837/chinas-m...