title: How does the Uber driver app receive immediate and reliable ride requests?
body: <p>How does the Uber driver app receive ride requests even when the app is in the background?</p>
  
  <p>It cannot be push notifications because:</p>
  
  <p>a) a background push notification won't be delivered to the app if
     the app was terminated by the user </p>
  
  <p>b) background push notifications
     are just too unreliable in terms of time of delivery to the app to be
     usable for an app where immediate receipt of the drive requests is of
     paramount importance (if the device is sleeping a background push may
     not be delivered to the app for several hours) </p>
  
  <p>c) if notifications
     are disabled for the Uber app then it can still receive the ride
     requests. Hence ride requests cannot be being implemented using
     either background nor foreground push notifications.</p>
  
  <p>Voip push notifications will wake a terminated app and don't have the same delays that can occur with regular push notifications so they are ideal to use for a ride request, yet as far as I know Uber apps do not provide any voip functionality to the user, therefore if the Uber Driver app is using the voip background mode then the app should never have been accepted for the app store as it is misusing the voip background mode.</p>
  
  <p>So how does the Uber Driver app implement reliable and timely receipt of ride requests?</p>