Well your not taking into account all the A/B tests they are running, the fact that they have custom experiences for different locations (SFO, India, etc). I can easily see how they would get up to that number pretty quickly at the scale they are at.
If you have the app, move your map pin to a different city / country to see how it changes. Lots of little and interesting changes depending on which part of the world you're in.
At some point, consider the use of different apps altogether. Perhaps having a front loader to detect which local app should pop up based on information gleaned from the phone and GPS.
What would be the criteria for splitting something out? They do this with uber eats but I can't imagine them doing this for anything else.
Why would I as a user want to download a variety of separate apps to hail cars, etc in different locations? People got really pissed off when Messenger was split out of Facebook (it's still mentioned in app store reviews to this day) I'd imagine they would not be wild about Uber doing something similar. I could see this getting really annoying really quickly.
Imagine landing at a new airport and having to download a new app just to hail a car or a tuk tuk or whatever.
From a user perspective, you may not have to download a new app.
Different locale, different customs, regulations may dictate entire different screens.
How an "app" is designed and packaged internally to enable the business to respond quickly does not have to impact the use experience. There are plenty of design patterns and engineering experience to draw from. It's a somewhat boring topic.
I find it more interesting to find answers to question such as:
1. A native person in India will be presented with an "Indian" app, satisfying the locale, regulations, laws, culture, etc.
2. A tourist landing in India, well, er, what version should that person use? Laws, regulations still apply (well, Uber may have a different take :) ) but how about the user experience and colloquial details? Would the tourist prefer something from home or something that more accurately, and perhaps more apt for India?
So why is this better from a user or engineering perspective than having just one app?
"There are plenty of design patterns and engineering experience to draw from. It's a somewhat boring topic."
I disagree, I think its a fascinating topic but then again I might be biased as I'm a mobile developer ;) Very few organizations have single app's that are worked on by > 50 people. I worked on the FB iOS app for several years. When an app gets that big you run into all sorts of problems that are not obvious both from an engineering and product perspective.
So to me it's pretty interesting to read about how Uber tackled these problems. Especially as it pertains to Swift which has had quite a number of performance issues and language changes.
"1. A native person in India will be presented with an "Indian" app, satisfying the locale, regulations, laws, culture, etc."
Why not have the app detect that and adapt to that user rather than having a separate app?
"2. A tourist landing in India, well, er, what version should that person use? Laws, regulations still apply (well, Uber may have a different take :) ) but how about the user experience and colloquial details? Would the tourist prefer something from home or something that more accurately, and perhaps more apt for India?"
When you land at a different airport currently uber provides a customized experience for that airport/locale. It knows that you are in a different local.
It seems like they've broken into teams organized around features where teams own their feature in all locales. I think that's a better decomposition than one around centered around locales. Centering development around locale is actually incredibly absurd.
