Uber is adding a tipping feature to its smartphone app, one of several changes the scandal-rocked ride-hailing company announced on Tuesday that will roll out over the next few months to appease frustrated drivers.
The option to leave a tip directly in the app is now available for rides in Seattle, Minneapolis, and Houston. Uber plans to roll it out in all US cities that it serves by the end of July.
Even though competing ride-hailing apps like Lyft and Gett have long offered the ability to tip from within their apps, Uber has been a holdout; tipping is optional but drivers are allowed to solicit cash tips, it said. Since Uber is an otherwise cashless experience, that has made tipping awkward, pitting riders who don't like fumbling with their wallets against drivers who feel they deserve gratuities.
Drivers are already fuming at Uber for a variety of other reasons, from accidental underpayments to deceptive recruiting tactics, not to mention the fact that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was caught on camera recently berating an Uber driver who quizzed him about the firm's shortcomings (he and Uber are currently on a break). So the company is trying to clean up its act, offering a range of concessions to drivers in addition to in-app tipping.
Related
- Uber Tips for a Smooth RideshareUber Tips for a Smooth Rideshare
The other concessions include reducing the cancellation grace period from five minutes to two minutes, so that drivers already en route to pick up a rider will collect more in fees if the rider decides to cancel. It will also pay drivers a per-minute rate for wait times of more than two minutes, something it started testing last year in Dallas, New Jersey, New York, and Phoenix.
In an email to drivers on Tuesday, Uber said that it will add more driver-friendly changes to its app over the next six months. "Some changes will be big, some will be small—all will be changes drivers have asked for," the email stated.
New York City-based advocacy group Independent Drivers Guild praised the decision to add in-app tipping, which it claimed was a result of its lobbying efforts. "Today's tipping announcement is an important win for drivers and proves that thousands of drivers coming together with one voice can make big changes," IDG founder Jim Conigliaro said in a statement. "Make no mistake, Uber only did this because members of the Independent Drivers Guild pressured regulators."
Watch them while you can.
The lawsuit says former Uber executive Eric Alexander obtained the victim's records after the sexual assault and shared them with other executives.
Some services already offer in-app tipping, but drivers in New York City want the same from Uber.
Do you know last year alone 226 billion mobile apps have been downloaded? Well, from this stunning figure you can easily make out the size of the opportunity fo...
Relax Uber Adds In-App Tipping stories
Once your live broadcast ends, you'll see an option at the bottom of the screen labeled 'Share.' Tap that to add a replay of your live video to Instagram Stories for 24 hours.
Aesthetic changes will be rolling out across twitter.com, Twitter for iOS, Twitter for Android, TweetDeck, and Twitter Lite 'over the coming weeks and days.'
Uber's board adopted the recommendations of an investigation into its workplace culture, and plans to reassign some of CEO Travis Kalanick's duties to other employees.
Tired of searching through hundreds of emojis for the perfect way to express yourself? Draw one with your finger and Google's keyboard app will match it.
Riders willing to share their journeys with another passenger will get up to 40 percent off their fare when using the Via or Get taxi apps in New York City.
Don't expect to get a ride from a self-driving car in Beantown just yet, though: the company still has to secure the necessary permits.
If you've been paying attention to what some of the most popular social media apps have been doing as of late, Highlights won't be a new concept.
Uber incorrectly calculated how much its commission should have been on rides in New York City over the past two and a half years, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Want to start a business? There's an app - or four - for that.
Hard work can pay off -- if you know how to seize the right moments.
A Facebook staffer said 'code written by women was rejected much more frequently than code written by their male colleagues.' Facebook says she's working with incomplete data.
Easily share all the reservations for your trip with the tap of a button, manually update your itinerary, and use the app to keep your train and bus reservations organized.
When the person indicates their UberPool trip sucked because they didn't like the route or their co-rider, Uber won't count the rating towards a driver's average.
The electric plane will be able to take off and land vertically, and Uber hopes to have a fleet of 50 ready for testing in Dallas and Dubai by 2020.
Plastc promised its card device could store information from up to 20 other payment cards, saving customers the bother of carrying wallets filled with different cards.
A lawsuit filed yesterday in the Southern District of New York claims that the Windows version of Confide doesn't offer screenshot protection.
Microsoft plans to incorporate the best features of Wunderlist into a new app, To-Do, over the coming months, then discontinue Wunderlist.
Uber's diversity problem is perhaps most apparent when looking at the makeup of its tech leadership team, which is 88.7 percent male, and entirely white or Asian.
The crash in Tempe, Ariz., didn't cause any injuries, but it added more woes to Uber's already controversial self-driving experiment.
Leaked documents show that Uber's autonomous vehicles can't even go a mile, on average, before a human safety driver needs to assume control.
You spend more than half of your life at work so you might as well do something you love, according to this businesswoman.
Uber allegedly stole technology from Google's self-driving car project, now called Waymo.
Uber is now reviewing the technology, which deceives authorities in cities where the ride-hailing service is banned.
In the search for disruptive technologies and new ways to approach the same business issues, women are proving to be game-changers here in the Valley.
If you haven't checked this entire list, you aren't ready to launch.
Identify which idea can gain traction and make you a happy business owner.
What stage of business is your startup in?
Many introverts excel at running their own startups or being self-employed. Here's a list of low-cost business ideas that maximize on the skills of introversion for under $1,000.
Nobody you hire works for free and neither should you.
Here are some pros and cons of each model -- decide which works best for you.
Sphero is looking beyond toys and into intelligent robots for your home.
Keeping track of mobile devices with access to your corporate network is more important than ever. We test some of the best Mobile Device Management (MDM) tools to help you keep your IT environment safe.
No matter your skill level or experience, there's an online school that can teach you how to code.
Tiny video cameras with multiple ultra-wide lenses capture the entire world around you—all 360 degrees of it. Here's how the most popular models stack up in our testing.
Ceci n'est pas une photo ID.
Previously limited to iOS, Firefox Focus automatically blocks ads and many of the trackers that normally follow you around the web and slow down your browsing.
OnePlus has always made good phones, but its newest one is just fantastic.
Your Android phone or tablet is a portal to an amazing selection of world-class gaming titles. Here are 10 of our favorites.
Watch them while you can.
Secure managed file transfer (MFT) software is an oft-overlooked but critical component of how your company moves data between locations and employees. We review five of the best.
