Uber wants you to do more than just sit around during rides

Have you ever had trouble entertaining yourself while you’re getting a ride through Uber? If so, then you’re not alone, and Uber wants to make your rides a little more interesting. On Tuesday, the company announced Uber Trip Experiences, a new way for app developers to integrate their apps into Uber’s app. With it, third-party apps that you’ve approved will be able to push content to you, but what makes this different than you just opening up Spotify and listening to some music is that the pushed content is customized specifically for your trip. For example, if your ride was expected to take around ten minutes, Spotify would create a ten minutes long playlist and push it to your smartphone, and that’s just one example.

We opened our API to developers globally over a year ago. Since then we’ve seen the creative ways that other apps have used Uber’s API to help get riders from A to B. Buy baseball tickets on StubHub and you’ll get a reminder to book your ride when it’s time to head for the game. It’s the same with United Airlines for flights and OpenTable for restaurant reservations. And Facebook’s Messenger lets you and your friends request a ride right when you are chatting. These integrations help make life simpler and easier for people to get around. During the holidays, we completed our billionth trip. Added together that’s a lot of time riders spend in an Uber. Which got us thinking … what if developers could also offer users of their apps new ways to enjoy themselves — or get stuff done — while they’re on the road? So today we’re excited to announce the launch a new developer feature called Uber Trip Experiences which connects riders with their favorite apps at the start of a trip when they may have some time to spare. That said, we know that people’s time is precious and sometimes passengers just want to sit back and relax in peace. So users will be in complete control. They will need to give permission before any app can connect to Uber and access their trip details. And if they find it’s not useful, users will be able to turn off the feature on an app by app basis.