Why We Decided to Rewrite Uber's Driver App
Article Summary
Uber rewrote their entire driver app with hundreds of engineers over 18 months. Joel Spolsky once called rewrites 'the single worst strategic mistake' a software company can make.
This is the first in a series from Uber's mobile engineering team detailing their decision to completely rebuild the driver app (codenamed Carbon) used by 3+ million driver-partners. The decision came after a rigorous three-month research process involving cross-organizational buy-in.
Key Takeaways
- Technical debt caused real outages; app couldn't maintain 99.99% uptime requirement
- UI designed for UberX couldn't scale to Pool, Eats, and market-specific features
- Past migrations at Uber had high incompletion rates, creating more tech debt
- Rewrite aligned with new RIBs architecture already adopted for rider app
- Decision driven by business needs, not theoretical 'clean code' desires
Critical Insight
Uber chose a full rewrite over migration because incomplete past migrations created instability, the product needed fundamental redesign, and standardizing on RIBs architecture would double platform investment value.
