When San Francisco–based Lyft launched its Lyft Line service earlier this year, the company was fulfilling its original promise: to improve public transportation through carpooling. Now, six months later, Lyft Line comprises most of the company’s rides in its home city—spurring CEO Logan Green to proclaim that the promise has morphed into a successful platform.
According to Green, Line’s success took off even before the company launched its $3 “Match MUNI” deal. But after the discount program, the carpooling service became the significant majority of rides. “We see Lyft Line as a platform we build on,” he said, during his South By Southwest keynote Monday. “The things we can do are really exciting.”
When asked to name examples he referenced a new feature called driver destination, which allows Lyft drivers to tell the app where they’re headed. That way, they can do rides en route to work, home, or errands, without going too far out of their way. It’s a feature Lyft copied off Sidecar, which Green conveniently forgot to mention, even as he chastised Uber for copying Lyft with UberX, the competitor’s own take on carpooling.
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Not so fast. While it’s easy to understand Green’s enthusiasm—he says Lyft Line now accounts for most of the company’s rides in its home city—but he’s stretching the term “platform” a bit.
Unlike Uber, Lyft doesn’t offer public APIs (application programming interfaces), so it’s not a traditional platform off which developers can build. The company itself may be creating new products and services to suit its customers, but it’s not a true platform until it allows others to do so.
Green and his co-founder John Zimmer haven’t explained why there’s no public Lyft API yet. Since Uber has the head start on this, it can strike deals and partnerships with companies like restaurants and hotels to incorporate the “request a ride” button into their apps. Given Uber’s cutthroat competitiveness with Lyft, it’s likely that these deals will restrict partners from working with Lyft in the future.
See also: What APIs Are And Why They’re Important
But Lyft just raised another round of funding, a $530 million Series E, to help it grow. Perhaps we’ll be seeing a Lyft API sooner rather than later.
Photos by Owen Thomas for ReadWrite
