It's so easy that there's like 5 or 6 of them that I know of in Romania alone and drivers will swap between 2-3 of them every day. So yeah, it's pretty trivial. While there's no reason to start one if you can't undercut Uber or whoever's already cutrate prices, that doesn't mean Uber has a lot of room to increase prices/profits.

It is pretty peak HN to assume the world is only the US. Outside the US there are plenty of taxi apps. So, yes, we know from evidence that they are easy to build. The trick is getting customers and drivers for your app.

Do this exercise. Pick any country. See how many taxi apps available. They may not be called Uber and Lyft, but I bet there are only a handful at best, anywhere you pick (see Careem). That's the nature of the business.

It's not easy if you want one app that deals with a market containing many different legal jurisdictions with widely varying tax and safety and labor and consumer protection requirements. Plus different countries might need different payment system and need localization to different languages.

But if the market you want to deal with is just one city or metro area or similar then it is not a difficult app.

There's not a huge network effect between cities though and there's high fixed costs for each one so it's not a great technology business.

> Just another HN Tuesday I see. It’s so easy that it’s still duopoly in US since the inception of the market.

I'd suggest that this is not necessarily related to how hard the tech side is. Both major incumbents have (until now!) been throwing away VC money without any clear path to profitability, so there hasn't exactly been much of an incentive to build yet another money pit.