The whole point of these bikeshare services is that each bike has a GPS and the central system can livefeed the guaranteed location of nearby available bikes to

The whole point of these bikeshare services is that each bike has a GPS and the central system can livefeed the guaranteed location of nearby available bikes to a user's phone. If O-bike didn't have GPS, then it wasn't a real bikeshare service. I wouldn't trust Mobike to be more about the bike than O-bike was, though. A few months after joining Mobike in China earlier this year, they decreased the default scale on the location map in their app when you first open it. Within a few months, the usual number of nearby bikes had noticeably decreased, but this was obscured in the app map because of the smaller scaling. It seems like they changed the app map scaling because they were planning the decrease in bikes in the local area. Perhaps they had collected enough deposits in this district, and moved the bikes in bulk to another district of the city with fewer signups to make it look like bikes were always available there, thus encouraging people there to pay deposits.