By far the most common method to access the ride-sharing platform Uber in the United States is via smartphone; around 17.7 million U.S. adults had accessed Uber via smartphone as of April 2017 – significantly higher than the next most popular platform, desktop computers, with 6.8 million users.
The U.S. ride sharing market
Uber is the largest ride-sharing platform in the United States, accounting for just under 70 percent of the total market as of October 2018. However Lyft, the next-largest ride sharing platform in the U.S., has seen
significant growth in ridership over the last five years, narrowing the gap between it and Uber.
The global ride sharing market
While Lyft may be gaining some ground on Uber in the U.S.,
globally the distance between Uber and Lyft is much larger. This is due both to the fact that Lyft currently only operate in North America, and the strong global growth that Uber has seen over the last few years.
Uber’s global number of bookings per quarter more than doubled from the fourth quarter of 2016 to the fourth quarter of 2018, leading to
their net revenue almost doubling from 2016 to 2018.