Totally missing from that blog post: People won't want to use something if Google tries to cram it down their neck. I lost count of the various dirty tactics they used to try force me onto it.
I recently worked in a smaller German city without Uber. It was like stepping back into the stone age.
'MyTaxi' app would only produce an available driver 1 in 20 times I tried.
The only way to get a taxi is to walk out into the freezing street and wait like a penguin, or find one of those random locations Taxis like to park at.
Sucks for the customer. I hope Uber takes over the planet.
Developers at these big companies get bored & assume they know better than a mature open source solution so like to reinvent a perfectly good wheel basically.