>It's only the surface-level of an ride-hailing app that seems easy for worker-owned cooperatives to create. In reality, the extra expensive programming dollars required to tame the hidden complexity so that the app can present a seamless experience to the customers/passengers is a huge factor that works against co-ops.

This "seamless" experience is actually not required by most people. While it's amazing that I can land it a random major city around the world, pull out my Uber and hitch a ride, it's not a requirement for most people. Most people travel a few times a year, and those who travel for work are used to the context switch anyway. Very rarely do they land in a brand new city every time. Usually its a rotation of the same set of cities, for which they can use the corollary set of apps. The friction is only in the beginning. Besides, in the post covid world, I'd imagine business travel is going to take a huge hit, so this is less of a concern. Also, Uber has retreated from a lot of countries over the past few years, so this benefit is not true anymore.

> Real-life customers don't want to enter their credit-card details into City_X_driver_coop and then re-enter their financial details multiple times again into City_Y_driver_coop. Even if you imagine a hypothetical national co-op to consolidate multiple cities, customers would still then have inconvenience of Country_X_coop and Country-Y_coop.

This such a minor inconvenience. It's like saying, "I wish Amazon was dominant all over the world. It's so annoying that when I go to America I need to use Amazon but in Brazil I need to use Mercado!" If there is a trusted an app in a country that everyone uses, I don't mind entering in my details. Signing up takes 2 mins.

> That's the financial constraint that causes co-ops to more easily organize in lower complexity businesses such as local grocery co-op or a farming coop. But a high-tech complexity business that's expensive to build is inherently too costly for a pool of drivers' savings to fund

Ride hailing is not technically complex. There are many open source repos that do it. What makes it very complex in Uber's case is because they need to handle every single scenario. If they had only one country, or even one state, the tech because so much more straight forward and even scaling becomes much easier. The complexity is entirely self inflicted because of their single app model. Amazon for example has it's own India app. I can't imagine the headache and complexity they'd have if they tried to do an India + US app.

> Sure, the driver co-ops can choose to not spend capital on "useless" features but this leaves out the fact that customers can also choose not to use the co-ops because of the lower quality app experience. Keep in mind the behavior of customers who prioritize conveniences.

I agree poor user experience could be the downfall of such apps. I think it's only a matter of time before someone creates the model of a rider cooperative. Technically it's possible and contrary to what you say doesn't require as much capital. It does require amazing execution which is where I think most of these upstarts are failing. As a customer I am happy to support the local upstarts even if it means a minor app switch.