[usaar333]

The article is rather light on details on what Didi actually did better, but from using Uber as a foreigner in China, I could see significant problems in Uber's product execution:

1. The Android app continues to use Google Maps which is Great Firewall blocked, meaning I had to use a VPN to load uncached tiles.

2. Uber in turn IP blocks EC2, preventing me from using my main VPN while in app.

3. Entities on the map are shifted by the GCJ-02 offset (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...), meaning entities on the map are shifted by 0.5 miles (look at those cars driving on parkland: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hhkrjyka5uq0pfb/PeopleUber.png?dl=...)

4. User support was absolutely non-existent. After I responded to an automatic email from the local community manager inviting me to ask any questions, I only received an automated emails telling me I won't be helped.

5. Help pages in the app on Uber China tell me to see the Chinese translation, with no actual link to said translation.

While the foreigner use-case in China is niche, the sheer amount of obvious (and easily resolvable) problems I ran into suggests that Uber has organizational problems ensuring both drivers and customers have good experiences in foreign countries.

One blog from Jan 2014 highlights how bad the execution was at launch: https://www.larrysalibra.com/5-problems-with-uber-in-china-a... - the most absurd being that Uber (at that time) only accepted US-branded credit cards which few Chinese nationals hold.

[tluyben2]

For 1 & 2: when was that as for the last 1.5 years at least they use Baidu and it works fine. 3 yes indeed, very annoying. 4. In the west support is good: from China they just do not respond unless a driver screwed me on purpose (doing the ride without me in the car which happened a few time): I would receive no mail but the amount paid would be set to 0 rmb. 5. Even most car brand names are in Chinese now it seems.

What we find most annoying that I always set pick up as an intersection of two streets (fuxing/wulumuqi but in Chinese) and then stand on the corner and yet they always call to ask where we are. We are on the f*cking corner I entered and we do not speak Chinese very well so a mumbling guy does not work well. They stopped allowing you to send sms to the driver, like you can in other countries which would allow to send google offline translated details... so often they just cancel the ride because we cannot explain. Uber Black still do their best so usually that is the easiest.

Last year things were definitely easier. Drivers were doing their best more for foreigners, you could sms and they would not call before, they would just pick you up.

A big pet peeve is with Google and maybe someone here knows how to fix it; I use Google Translate with offline translations but when you are online, even though Google cannot be reached, it will try to do it online. It is beyond annoying when you quickly want to translate something, you have offline installed and yet it will just hang trying to reach the mothership...

Edit: now that I have access to Google to search for my Translate issue, I will give Netguard a go.

[usaar333]

1/2: Are you on iPhone or Android? I was there a month ago and my Google Playstore downloaded variant only used Google Maps.

Great point on the driver calling being an issue for non-Mandarin speakers. I also experienced this. I actually asked drivers why they do this and apparently riders seem to put incorrect location information in -- this in itself indicates there is some problem.

Regardless, I don't begrudge Uber much here; the driver call culture is hard to fix (even in America, I'm called sometimes) and it's not unreasonable to require your customer base speak the local language. (It is unreasonable though for the phone app to assume your locale matches the local language [help screen problem] or to assume that you've downloaded the app from a completely local source [Google maps source issue])

[tluyben2]

> 1/2: Are you on iPhone or Android? I was there a month ago and my Google Playstore downloaded variant only used Google Maps.

Android. But my wife has iOS and that works as well?

> egardless, I don't begrudge Uber much here; the driver call culture is hard to fix (even in America, I'm called sometimes) and it's not unreasonable to require your customer base speak the local language. (It is unreasonable though for the phone app to assume your locale matches the local language [help screen problem] or to assume that you've downloaded the app from a completely local source [Google maps source issue])

Agree, but not being able to SMS while you can in every other country IS something to begrudge Uber for. If I could immediately SMS with a perfect Chinese sentence explaining where I am, which is how I always do it in countries I don't speak the language (well), then this saves all the hassle. They should put that back immediately. In Hongkong it has it (as it has it everywhere else) and the driver never calls...

[tluyben2]

Tried Netguard; doesn't work. Apparently Translate does not check the network, it checks if the network is on. While it it is on, it will try to reach Google for the translation. Meaning I need a separate offline device just for translate I guess.

[chrischen]

#1 - was this because you were still using the US store downloaded app? I highly doubt they would release Uber to Chinese people with a non-working maps.

[tomtang0514]

When I was in China early this year, they use baidu map on my iphone version. It looks like there was a partnership between baidu and uber back then. There's even a "get Uber" feature build inside Baidu Map app back then.

[tluyben2]

It uses Baidu for sure and has been for at least 1.5 years.

Edit: looked up the first time I used Uber in Shanghai.

[usaar333]

Yes, I was using the playstore app.

But this is what I mean as an example of an easily fixable problem. If user is using the Play Store app, show a dialog or otherwise redirect them to another source. Even a simple help menu telling you about the problem and how to fix it is low-cost.

[jensvdh]

Why does Uber block EC2?

[dylz]

This is pretty standard, we block all "cloud" ranges for end-user-facing things (antifraud, etc)

Bots on EC2 scraping and bruteforcing and whatnot, free tier being abused for free proxies

[toomuchtodo]

Good to know for future projects.

[dylz]

Understandably this is something you should make the correct choice for yourself, you might want to be scraped on readonly articles or public pages for things like thumbnails on reddit from EC2, but deny all `HTTPS POST /register` or something from EC2.