Lyft vs Uber: App First Impressions

I did my first significant Lyft driving last weekend, and it was very interesting comparing their app experience to Uber's.

The first big difference is the app setup itself - Uber provides a separate driver ("Partner") app, which you have to download from them and trust their developer certificate for - it's not published on the app stores (at least not on iOS). Lyft, on the other hand, built the driver functionality right into their regular passenger app - instead of opening a different app, you just open the Lyft app and switch to driver mode. I'm not yet sure what, if any, difference this will make from a practical standpoint, though it is nice to have one less app to deal with.

Another app thing I really noticed when driving was the way that Lyft interacts with Waze. Like Uber, Lyft lets you choose what navigation app you want to use. When it launches Waze, though, unlike Uber it does some sort of "data sharing" thing that Waze asks permission for, and you actually get a Lyft logo in the Waze map that you can use to go back to the Lyft app. That's pretty neat.

Lyft also seems to actually send destination info to Waze differently. With Uber, your destination is always a pin, which appears to be set with lat/long coordinates to match the pin in the Uber app, even if the app displayed an address. When you go into Waze from Uber, it dives right into navigation mode. Lyft, on the other hand, sometimes (maybe always? I wasn't quite sure) seems to send the street address shown, into search mode, so you have to select it, then hit Go twice, to actually start navigation (I think both "Go"s have timers on them to auto-select but still).

On the one hand, Lyft's way is better in cases like Newbury St in Boston, where there are back alleys on either side, and if the pin Uber sends is closer to one of those than to Newbury St, Waze will incorrectly route you to the alley, thinking you really want to be on that side. By contrast, when Lyft sends an actual street address on Newbury St to Waze, Waze can "know" the real destination better and apply its own logic. On the other hand, the additional clicks are annoying, and when I had a fare to the airport, the search results were super weird and made me nervous, so I re-searched and put in the airport manually. So that was sub-optimal.

Next post: more about the meat of the app, driving, and getting paid.