My Uber Passengers Hates Uber Navigation
I have been driving with the Uber App for the past nine months and lived through many changes, like the institution of surge pricing and loss of heatmaps. Many have been good but some of them are just terrible.
One of these changes is the navigation on the Uber Driver app. About two months ago, Uber added the option to navigate to the passenger pickup and later added a feature for passengers to enter in their destination and using the Uber App to navigate to their destination. This was a great addition to the Uber Driver App, until many of us actually started using it.
To state for the record, navigation is better than no navigation. It was a pain to have to use another GPS to navigate to the pickup and then again to their destination. This new features saves a lot of time.
My issue with it is the implementation of the navigation feature on the Uber Driver App. The navigation feature is built into the Uber Driver App and there is no option to use a third party app like Waze or Google Maps for navigation. Why bother doing that, Uber? Why did you have to design a navigation program from the ground up? I don’t think they understand that Google spent billions of dollars on their navigation software and another few billion dollars on their maps. Why reinvent the wheel when Google and Waze already has a very good navigation program.
In the first revision of the software, the navigation would freeze up just before the destination so you couldn’t see where to turn off into as that part of the map wasn’t visible. After two more updates, that issue seemed to be resolved but now most of the time you can’t move the map to see whats coming up ahead. You need to press overview to see it, and then go back to navigating.
My passengers are starting to notice how bad the Uber Driver App navigation is. Luckily, I always ask how the passenger wants to get to their destination. In most cities, there are many ways to get around and usually passengers have a preference on which one they think is faster. When I ask them now, they always mention how bad the navigation is on the Uber Driver App and then mention a few directions to get to their destination, which almost always contradicts what the Uber Driver App says. My passengers noted that the Uber directions always take a longer and slower route than Google.
I normally use Google Maps to navigate and even in standstill traffic, my passengers have never complained about Google Maps. I just point to the phone and say “that’s what Google is telling me” and usually the complaints stop there. If they do ask, I will chime in to say that many people use Google so the maps know which way is faster or slower in real time so considering when we started driving, this was the best route to take.
(BTW, Google Navigation started in 2007 and it took them years before it was as good or better than TomTom and Garmin. Trust me, I lived through Google Navigation Beta after many dead end streets and 4 consecutive left turns)
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