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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
by gregdoesit 4y ago
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 push notifications, and gather more metadata from users - some of which can be used for eg more signal on determining if a request might be fraudulent.
[1] https://eng.uber.com/m-uber/ https://eng.uber.com/m-uber/
- captn3m0 4y agoUber actually had two of these: m.uber and dial.uber.com which was geo-fenced to India and from what I understood (looking at the UX, API calls etc) built by a separate team. The latter was shut down unceremoniously a few years ago, but that was always my favourite thing to point out how over-engineered Uber often was - to the point of having two separate mobile websites for the exact same purpose.
- gregdoesit 4y agoWow, I never knew of dial.uber.com!! m.uber.com was built by an engineering team in India, but for global usage.
- mattlondon 4y agoJust tried it in London - logged in as usual, all looks good until you try to book, then it tells you booking is not available and to use the app.
- pbreit 4y agoLyft has a nice one, too: https://ride.lyft.com/ https://ride.lyft.com/
- notpushkin 4y agoI'm not sure if it isn't blocked now, but I remember m.uber being blocked for Russian users a couple years ago. My phone died and I had to change trains in a couple dozen minutes in the middle of the night, so this wasn't a very pleasant experience :')
- Nextgrid 4y agoI tried this once in London and it wouldn't work.