Three Apps, One System
An on-demand platform is really three connected products: the customer app that places and tracks orders, the driver app that receives and fulfills them, and the admin dashboard where your team monitors and manages everything. They share one backend, so an order placed in one instantly appears in the others.
We build these as a single coordinated system rather than three disconnected apps, so status, location, and payment stay in sync in real time across every role.
- Customer app: browse, order, pay, and track live
- Driver app: accept jobs, navigate, update status, capture proof of delivery
- Admin dashboard: monitor orders, drivers, and zones in real time
- Shared real-time backend so every role sees the same current state
- Ratings and history for both customers and drivers
Live Tracking and Smart Dispatch
The features that make these apps feel magical are live location on a map and dispatch that assigns the right driver automatically. Both are real engineering: streaming driver GPS efficiently without draining batteries, and matching orders to drivers by distance, availability, and load.
We build the tracking and dispatch layer to handle the messy realities — drivers going offline, orders getting reassigned, and location updates arriving out of order — so the map stays accurate and jobs don't fall through the cracks.
- Real-time driver location on a live map with ETA updates
- Automatic or manual dispatch based on proximity and availability
- Reassignment when a driver cancels or goes offline
- Route and navigation handoff to Google/Apple Maps
- Battery-conscious background location and geofenced status updates
- Delivery zones, surge/availability rules, and driver payout tracking
More on cross-platform apps
Frequently asked questions
How does live driver tracking actually work?
The driver app streams GPS location to your backend over a real-time channel, and the customer app subscribes to those updates to move the marker and recalculate ETA. The engineering challenge is doing this efficiently so it's smooth on the customer's screen without draining the driver's battery. We tune the update frequency and use background location carefully to balance both.
Do I need to build the driver app and customer app separately?
They're separate apps because the experiences are completely different, but they run on one shared backend, so they behave like a single system. In practice we build them together with as much shared code as sensible. You'll also want an admin dashboard, which is part of the same platform.
How are payments and driver payouts handled?
Customer payments typically run through Stripe (physical goods and real-world services can use it directly), and driver payouts can run through Stripe's payout tooling or your own accounting. Because money, tips, and refunds get complicated across three roles, we design the payment flow explicitly during scoping rather than treating it as an afterthought.