Mobility · Case study

Ride-hailing with real-time dispatch, done right

Rider and driver apps with geo-matching, background location tracking and live offers — the hard parts of an Uber-class product.

<1sfrom ride request to driver offer via change streams
2apps (rider + driver) sharing one realtime backend
100%of releases gated by an automated JUnit suite
5 mindispatch staleness cutoff protecting riders from ghost drivers
The problem

Ride-hailing lives or dies on real-time behaviour: stale driver locations, missed ride offers and Android battery optimizations silently killing background tracking. The challenge was building dispatch that stays accurate in the real world — not just in a demo.

What we built

Dispatch is built on geospatial queries over live driver locations, with MongoDB change streams pushing ride offers to drivers over WebSockets in under a second of a rider's request.

The driver app runs a native Android background location service, hardened against battery optimization and OS process-kills — the single most common failure point in ride-hailing apps — with staleness rules that stop offers reaching drivers whose location can no longer be trusted.

Driver onboarding includes a full KYC document-verification flow with admin review, rejection-with-reasons and photo re-upload — the operational backbone that lets the fleet scale safely.

Rider app
Set pickup & drop
Matching driver…
Live trip tracking
Driver app
Ride offer 0:12
Navigate to pickup
Earnings today
Admin console
Driver KYC queue
Document review
Fleet status

Illustrative screens — each engagement gets its own design language.

Delivered features

  • Sub-second driver matching via geo-indexes
  • Live ride offers over WebSockets
  • Hardened Android background tracking
  • Driver KYC & document verification
  • Trip lifecycle: request → match → ride → payment
  • Admin verification console

How it was delivered

  1. Realtime coreGeo-indexed locations, change streams and the offer pipeline.
  2. The two appsRider and driver experiences with live trip state on both sides.
  3. Field hardeningBackground-location survival on real Android devices, KYC flows, launch.
IonicSpring BootMongoDBChange StreamsWebSockets

Representative engagement from our team's delivery portfolio, anonymized out of respect for the businesses involved. Every number above is an engineering fact we can walk you through on a call.

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