Lyft Android Tech Talks — Fall 2017
Pierce Johnson, Ryan Tempas, and I recently spoke at our Android Happy Hours as well as Droidcon SF & NYC 2017 to share our work with the broader tech community. We’re proud to represent the Lyft Android team and to share some of the fun and interesting projects we’ve worked on. Check out the recaps of each of our talks below!
Building, Launching, and Iterating on Lyft Shuttle
Shuttle was launched earlier this year as a beta program in San Francisco and Chicago. It aims to be a sustainable and affordable commuting solution — through building density along popular routes and filling higher occupancy vehicles, this feature can unlock lower per-ride price points for passengers and increase vehicle efficiency for drivers.
In this talk, I dive into the technical and product challenges of building this new product on Android while working with in a cross-functional team (whose responsibilities include passenger and driver experiences, route generation, matching, dispatch, engagement, growth, and overall strategy).
Architecting Amp: Android Integration with Embedded Systems
In his talk, Pierce presents an overview of integrating with the Lyft Amp, a Bluetooth LE embedded systems hardware device developed by Lyft and used by Lyft drivers. The device connects to the Lyft Driver app to display unique animations and information to drivers and passengers on two LED screens. The Amp can greet a passenger when the driver arrives at the pickup location, display the ETA for the ride’s destination, display the Seahawks colors on game days, and much more!
While the product itself is unique to Lyft, the core problems and challenges of building embedded systems into Android applications are not. Embedded systems programming is unfamiliar to most mobile developers, but may become a larger part of our lives in the ever expanding network of connected devices. His presentation dives into development processes and architectural components and decisions required for integrating bluetooth-enabled hardware into an Android app by using Lyft’s own embedded systems device — Lyft Amp — as an example.
Creating the Lyft Driver App: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Originally Lyft was a single app where users could switch between driver and passenger modes to give and receive rides. There were initial advantages to having one app with multiple modes, but after time this bloated the app size and significantly slowed the creation and release of new features. Splitting these two modes (one into a Passenger app and one into a Driver app) could be done many ways, but we settled upon using the modularization of various aspects of the code for the task. Ryan discusses the architecture and execution of this modularization choices made by Lyft in order to release the standalone Driver app.
Interested in joining the Lyft team? We’re hiring! Drop us a note at android@lyft.com.
