5 ms·

Just a few months ago, I was still able to get Lyft rides using a desktop browser; but, despite the web page still being very functional -- letting me select th

by saurik 3y ago

Just a few months ago, I was still able to get Lyft rides using a desktop browser; but, despite the web page still being very functional -- letting me select the endpoints, see nearby cars, and get pricing-timing information for the various options -- when I tried to do that this morning they made the button to do the actual booking process say something like "book using the app" and presented a dialog when I clicked it telling me they no longer supported booking from the website and I would have to use the app on a phone. I am pretty sure the web site even correctly tracked my ride after I booked... this one just feels particularly egregious to me as it clearly is almost fully still functional but they decided to explicitly not allow this use case anymore?

kristopolous 3y ago
That's so bull. I was a cto of a small ride sharing company where you could book through sms, a web page designed for flip phones, one for desktops, or a smart phone app - and this was in 2020. We had like 1/100th the budget of Lyft. It's inexcusable. An sms interface is super easy. You give it an address, then it reads it back to confirm it's right, gives you a list of price options and sends you updates... You can do the entire rideflow completely over sms assuming the person has already signed up. Even the tips, no problem. It feels more casual. We definitely got higher utilization after the SMS interface than before. The flip phone interface was actually great for people with old phones or on limited data plans, it too got a lot of use. This forcing of all the users through the same funnel is total bullshit. Wasn't personal computing supposed to be individuated instead of consolidated? Let's stop 1960s IBMing everything
- smabie 3y ago
  How many customers does Lyft lose because you can't book through a computer? I would guess close to zero
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    That's not correct. It's how many profit dollars does it lose. Most customers are hybrid customers - they will use say, Amazon.com on a desktop and on their phone. The question is do you want to cater to customers where they're at as that flow changes throughout the day or do you want to force them to come to you? Obviously it's the first. You want to push your way into their behavior through ubiquity. You keep it up for the same reason you keep the Denny's open at 3am Christmas morning or you have those 7 Starbucks within a mile radius - there's an important ideological commitment that defines your relationship with the customer as a reliable and accessible partner in their lives. It pays dividends at the macro level even if on the micro level it doesn't seem reasonable. You're either de facto infrastructure or luxury. Make sure that decision is yours and not the consumers. As far as what happened to the company, we had some high risk bets in 2020Q1 and bet everything on it and yeah well, pandemic. Shit happens.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      That, Lyft's behaviour, is what get by using endless VC money in the pursuit of building a customer data based monopoly of sorts. Well, VC money isn't endless anymore, is it?
      - kristopolous 3y ago
        It's hard to attribute replicable causitive agency to any success. If say Dolly Parton started a successful restaurant chain with line dancing waiters and barrels of hay everywhere, that doesn't mean country time jamborees are the things to be copied. There's a greater context that all these things exist in and they work holistically and specifically in a way that's codependent on everything else including uncontrollable external factors. You can't extract and replicate and expect success. If only it was that easy...
    - maccard 3y ago
      > Most customers are hybrid customers - they will use say, Amazon.com on a desktop and on their phone. Metrics that I've seen on projects I work on tell me otherwise. There are a small number of people who use desktop or laptop computers, and a smaller number that use multiple devices. The vast vast _vast_ majority of users use a smartphone.
  - robk 3y ago
    I've found a decent number of exec assistants that have this issue booking on behalf of their bosses. Uber Black is preferred by the boss but they wind up using Addison Lee or similar for this desktop booking. So there's money left on the table from fairly price insensitive customers.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - bsuvc 3y ago
    And the ones they do lose are "difficult customers". Not all customers are equal.
    - kristopolous 3y ago
      Or they're good customers and you're servicing them wrong. There's definitely ~10% that aren't worth welcoming back, but I'm playing interlocutor here. There's plenty of companies who tossed all their cash cows into volcanoes for the difficult customer belief which really stemmed from an inability to listen. Here, read up on the fall of WordStar for a premiere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroPro_International https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroPro_International Old software companies were famous for this: Lotus, VisiCorp, Digital Research - running away from their existing customers who they thought were atrophying to some presumed greener pastures that didn't exist only to end up with nobody because the problem was they had their heads up their asses the whole way. In this problem space there's 3 levels which are both of increasing accuracy but also increasing work. 1. Imagine your customers 2. Measure your customers 3. Know your customers and almost-customers, like personally. 3 doesn't scale but ignoring it is what can snag even the biggest companies
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        Wait ten years to see if Lyft survives the competition and you’ll have the answer.
  - fortran77 3y ago
    My 90 year old mother can't use a smartphone. She'd book rideshare rides if she could do it over a voice phone.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      My dad can use a smartphone when he wants to, e.g. ordering from Amazon. But he deeply resents and resists having to use web or native apps to do things like interact with his bank that he would historically have handled by calling them or going into a branch.
    - hollerith 3y ago
      She can call you, and you could use your Uber account to book a ride for her. At least, I succeeded in helping an elderly friend the one time I tried that.
      - fortran77 3y ago
        Too unweildy. Drivers cancel. I have to wait on the phone until she gets in the car. I'd also have to figure out exactly where she is so I can set the location. Have you every had to deal with a 90 year old? It's not simple.
        hollerith 3y ago
        Yes, that's what happened: the first 2 drivers cancelled because they showed up 100 yards away from where my elderly friend was. Then I figured out exactly where my friend was and changed the pickup location to one small enough that Uber and my friend were unlikely to not be able to see each other, then the trip went smoothly. I suppose Uber uses GPS data to guide the driver to the rider when GPS data is available from the rider's smartphone, but I'm glad that Uber doesn't insist on the presence of the GPS data or the smartphone.
- heavenlyblue 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    Lyft's platform choices in 2023 wasn't the driving cause of their initial funding round success in 2007. Lyft (actually Zimride at the time) grew up when both the iPhone was new and a bunch of people lost their jobs from a stock market crash. A tech stack decision from 16 years in the future isn't in play here. Also we sold the company and walked away with enough zeros for me.
    - resonious 3y ago
      It's seems quite common for software to seriously rot after success. At the start, technical excellence goes a long way. At some later point, the selling point is no longer the software itself, and instead just the network of existing users.
      - fyloraspit 3y ago
        Enshittification
      - kristopolous 3y ago
        You need groups with the courage of their convictions and a curated list of courageous convictions. That's the motivation of a startup. Reid Hoffman talked about it in blitzscaling although that literary style is my own
      - Zambyte 3y ago
        Propriety software has a shelf life. Free software that people actually use does not rot.
    - geoduck14 3y ago
      >Also we sold the company What companies are in the market to buy a ride sharing company? I'm guessing Lyfy and Uber would (might?) buy you for your customer acquisition- but I'm not getting the feeling that is what happened. Is there another genre of business that is interested in buying a ride-sharong business?
ljlolel 3y ago
I pushed for the creation of that at Lyft and got it done. Sad to see us abandoning it.
- prox 3y ago
  It’s sad and worrying. An app is nothing but a glorified webpage in most cases anyway, or at least it should be.
  - gcr 3y ago
    can't get those sweet sweet behavioral analytics and always-on location data from a webpage though!
behringer 3y ago
Get yourself bluestacks, the android emulator.
didntcheck 3y ago
It's frustrating how "mobile-first" has become "mobile-only". I've encountered several utility companies, banks, and other important services, who have fairly important features only present in the mobile apps (whereas I prefer to do "important business" like that sitting at my desk with a large screen and physical keyboard). The worst is when they don't even tell you this, offering a desktop web UI that is essentially in maintenance-only mode, and you only discover things are missing if you happen to install the app
- ghaff 3y ago
  Mobile apps can be useful but please let me do tasks from desktop web browser if I want to. Sadly, with the general shift to esp. younger people mostly using smartphones for many things, I expect the trend will continue.
- saurik 3y ago
  The irony of this, for me, is that when the iPhone came out, I was annoyed that people kept building "mobile-optimized" web UIs that had some trivial sliver of the functionality that their desktop website had... even though the iPhone pointedly comes with a full browser capable of rendering the full website: someone had just decided "people on their phone will only want to do these four things so let's make a simpler website with painfully-large text that only has four buttons on it to make that easier for them".
  - callalex 3y ago
    It was also fun seeing how long some of those sites held onto their pinstripe backgrounds.
Nextgrid 3y ago
All of these bullshit "growth & engagement" operations often have to meet the real-world and dial down the user-hostility in certain markets where it just won't fly. This explains why the web UI is there and why it ultimately worked - it's made to serve markets where high-end smartphone penetration is low or where bandwidth constraints wouldn't allow people to download the app. Uber has the same at https://m.uber.com https://m.uber.com - it actually appears to work well for my Western European location despite everyone here being used to the app, however it still shows artifacts of its primary target markets such as the option to pay in cash (not something we do in my location, and the app does not offer that as an option).
imchillyb 3y ago
Lyft generates additional revenue through tracking and selling data points not available through standard browsers and non portable devices. Using a browser for booking literally takes money out of Lyft’s pockets. How long should Lyft allow such profit adverse behavior to continue? Indefinitely?
hollerith 3y ago
Lyft also requires the ability to receive an SMS text at account creation (or more precisely if there is a way around that requirement, I couldn't find it) which is why I use Uber.
searchableguy 3y ago
Recently, I did not have a phone for a couple of days so I was using my laptop for everything. I came across so many bugs on the desktop equivalent of apps if they existed at all. Some of them were frustrating like when I tried to order food on swiggy, it would go through with a credit card then get auto refunded and cancelled. The catch? The order will be delivered anyway and appear back in your order history. The refund will not be processed. Due to this strange behaviour, I ended up ordering the same thing 4x until I received my first order and it magically appeared back in the list as fulfilled. The security guard asked me next day - why did you not receive all your orders that appeared late night? Was there a party?

by saurik 3y ago

kristopolous 3y ago

That's so bull. I was a cto of a small ride sharing company where you could book through sms, a web page designed for flip phones, one for desktops, or a smart phone app - and this was in 2020. We had like 1/100th the budget of Lyft. It's inexcusable. An sms interface is super easy. You give it an address, then it reads it back to confirm it's right, gives you a list of price options and sends you updates... You can do the entire rideflow completely over sms assuming the person has already signed up. Even the tips, no problem. It feels more casual. We definitely got higher utilization after the SMS interface than before. The flip phone interface was actually great for people with old phones or on limited data plans, it too got a lot of use. This forcing of all the users through the same funnel is total bullshit. Wasn't personal computing supposed to be individuated instead of consolidated? Let's stop 1960s IBMing everything

smabie 3y ago
How many customers does Lyft lose because you can't book through a computer? I would guess close to zero
- kristopolous 3y ago
  That's not correct. It's how many profit dollars does it lose. Most customers are hybrid customers - they will use say, Amazon.com on a desktop and on their phone. The question is do you want to cater to customers where they're at as that flow changes throughout the day or do you want to force them to come to you? Obviously it's the first. You want to push your way into their behavior through ubiquity. You keep it up for the same reason you keep the Denny's open at 3am Christmas morning or you have those 7 Starbucks within a mile radius - there's an important ideological commitment that defines your relationship with the customer as a reliable and accessible partner in their lives. It pays dividends at the macro level even if on the micro level it doesn't seem reasonable. You're either de facto infrastructure or luxury. Make sure that decision is yours and not the consumers. As far as what happened to the company, we had some high risk bets in 2020Q1 and bet everything on it and yeah well, pandemic. Shit happens.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    That, Lyft's behaviour, is what get by using endless VC money in the pursuit of building a customer data based monopoly of sorts. Well, VC money isn't endless anymore, is it?
    - kristopolous 3y ago
      It's hard to attribute replicable causitive agency to any success. If say Dolly Parton started a successful restaurant chain with line dancing waiters and barrels of hay everywhere, that doesn't mean country time jamborees are the things to be copied. There's a greater context that all these things exist in and they work holistically and specifically in a way that's codependent on everything else including uncontrollable external factors. You can't extract and replicate and expect success. If only it was that easy...
  - maccard 3y ago
    > Most customers are hybrid customers - they will use say, Amazon.com on a desktop and on their phone. Metrics that I've seen on projects I work on tell me otherwise. There are a small number of people who use desktop or laptop computers, and a smaller number that use multiple devices. The vast vast _vast_ majority of users use a smartphone.
- robk 3y ago
  I've found a decent number of exec assistants that have this issue booking on behalf of their bosses. Uber Black is preferred by the boss but they wind up using Addison Lee or similar for this desktop booking. So there's money left on the table from fairly price insensitive customers.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- bsuvc 3y ago
  And the ones they do lose are "difficult customers". Not all customers are equal.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    Or they're good customers and you're servicing them wrong. There's definitely ~10% that aren't worth welcoming back, but I'm playing interlocutor here. There's plenty of companies who tossed all their cash cows into volcanoes for the difficult customer belief which really stemmed from an inability to listen. Here, read up on the fall of WordStar for a premiere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroPro_International https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroPro_International Old software companies were famous for this: Lotus, VisiCorp, Digital Research - running away from their existing customers who they thought were atrophying to some presumed greener pastures that didn't exist only to end up with nobody because the problem was they had their heads up their asses the whole way. In this problem space there's 3 levels which are both of increasing accuracy but also increasing work. 1. Imagine your customers 2. Measure your customers 3. Know your customers and almost-customers, like personally. 3 doesn't scale but ignoring it is what can snag even the biggest companies
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Wait ten years to see if Lyft survives the competition and you’ll have the answer.
- fortran77 3y ago
  My 90 year old mother can't use a smartphone. She'd book rideshare rides if she could do it over a voice phone.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    My dad can use a smartphone when he wants to, e.g. ordering from Amazon. But he deeply resents and resists having to use web or native apps to do things like interact with his bank that he would historically have handled by calling them or going into a branch.
  - hollerith 3y ago
    She can call you, and you could use your Uber account to book a ride for her. At least, I succeeded in helping an elderly friend the one time I tried that.
    - fortran77 3y ago
      Too unweildy. Drivers cancel. I have to wait on the phone until she gets in the car. I'd also have to figure out exactly where she is so I can set the location. Have you every had to deal with a 90 year old? It's not simple.
      - hollerith 3y ago
        Yes, that's what happened: the first 2 drivers cancelled because they showed up 100 yards away from where my elderly friend was. Then I figured out exactly where my friend was and changed the pickup location to one small enough that Uber and my friend were unlikely to not be able to see each other, then the trip went smoothly. I suppose Uber uses GPS data to guide the driver to the rider when GPS data is available from the rider's smartphone, but I'm glad that Uber doesn't insist on the presence of the GPS data or the smartphone.
heavenlyblue 3y ago
[flagged]
- kristopolous 3y ago
  Lyft's platform choices in 2023 wasn't the driving cause of their initial funding round success in 2007. Lyft (actually Zimride at the time) grew up when both the iPhone was new and a bunch of people lost their jobs from a stock market crash. A tech stack decision from 16 years in the future isn't in play here. Also we sold the company and walked away with enough zeros for me.
  - resonious 3y ago
    It's seems quite common for software to seriously rot after success. At the start, technical excellence goes a long way. At some later point, the selling point is no longer the software itself, and instead just the network of existing users.
    - fyloraspit 3y ago
      Enshittification
    - kristopolous 3y ago
      You need groups with the courage of their convictions and a curated list of courageous convictions. That's the motivation of a startup. Reid Hoffman talked about it in blitzscaling although that literary style is my own
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      Propriety software has a shelf life. Free software that people actually use does not rot.
  - geoduck14 3y ago
    >Also we sold the company What companies are in the market to buy a ride sharing company? I'm guessing Lyfy and Uber would (might?) buy you for your customer acquisition- but I'm not getting the feeling that is what happened. Is there another genre of business that is interested in buying a ride-sharong business?

ljlolel 3y ago

I pushed for the creation of that at Lyft and got it done. Sad to see us abandoning it.

prox 3y ago
It’s sad and worrying. An app is nothing but a glorified webpage in most cases anyway, or at least it should be.
- gcr 3y ago
  can't get those sweet sweet behavioral analytics and always-on location data from a webpage though!

behringer 3y ago

Get yourself bluestacks, the android emulator.

didntcheck 3y ago

It's frustrating how "mobile-first" has become "mobile-only". I've encountered several utility companies, banks, and other important services, who have fairly important features only present in the mobile apps (whereas I prefer to do "important business" like that sitting at my desk with a large screen and physical keyboard). The worst is when they don't even tell you this, offering a desktop web UI that is essentially in maintenance-only mode, and you only discover things are missing if you happen to install the app

ghaff 3y ago
Mobile apps can be useful but please let me do tasks from desktop web browser if I want to. Sadly, with the general shift to esp. younger people mostly using smartphones for many things, I expect the trend will continue.
saurik 3y ago
The irony of this, for me, is that when the iPhone came out, I was annoyed that people kept building "mobile-optimized" web UIs that had some trivial sliver of the functionality that their desktop website had... even though the iPhone pointedly comes with a full browser capable of rendering the full website: someone had just decided "people on their phone will only want to do these four things so let's make a simpler website with painfully-large text that only has four buttons on it to make that easier for them".
- callalex 3y ago
  It was also fun seeing how long some of those sites held onto their pinstripe backgrounds.

Nextgrid 3y ago

All of these bullshit "growth & engagement" operations often have to meet the real-world and dial down the user-hostility in certain markets where it just won't fly. This explains why the web UI is there and why it ultimately worked - it's made to serve markets where high-end smartphone penetration is low or where bandwidth constraints wouldn't allow people to download the app. Uber has the same at https://m.uber.com https://m.uber.com - it actually appears to work well for my Western European location despite everyone here being used to the app, however it still shows artifacts of its primary target markets such as the option to pay in cash (not something we do in my location, and the app does not offer that as an option).

imchillyb 3y ago

Lyft generates additional revenue through tracking and selling data points not available through standard browsers and non portable devices. Using a browser for booking literally takes money out of Lyft’s pockets. How long should Lyft allow such profit adverse behavior to continue? Indefinitely?

hollerith 3y ago

Lyft also requires the ability to receive an SMS text at account creation (or more precisely if there is a way around that requirement, I couldn't find it) which is why I use Uber.

searchableguy 3y ago

Recently, I did not have a phone for a couple of days so I was using my laptop for everything. I came across so many bugs on the desktop equivalent of apps if they existed at all. Some of them were frustrating like when I tried to order food on swiggy, it would go through with a credit card then get auto refunded and cancelled. The catch? The order will be delivered anyway and appear back in your order history. The refund will not be processed. Due to this strange behaviour, I ended up ordering the same thing 4x until I received my first order and it magically appeared back in the list as fulfilled. The security guard asked me next day - why did you not receive all your orders that appeared late night? Was there a party?