I've had the Uber app on my phone since sometime in 2013. Used it in probably a dozen cities. Never once thought about deleting it until this weekend, and then I did it in about four seconds flat, no hesitation, no "let me think about it."
Quick recap in case you were offline for 48 hours (lucky you): on Saturday, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance called a one-hour work stoppage at JFK, drivers refusing airport pickups from 6 to 7pm, as a protest against the executive order signed Friday restricting entry from several countries. Right around that window, Uber tweeted that it was turning off surge pricing at JFK. Framed as "hey, no price gouging tonight," which sounds nice until you realize what it actually does: it tells people, hop in an Uber, the strike doesn't have to slow you down. That's not neutral. That's undercutting a protest while wearing a customer-friendly mask.
People noticed immediately. #DeleteUber was trending within hours and by Sunday it was everywhere, on my Twitter feed, on Hacker News, on Reddit threads with screenshots of people's "account deleted" confirmation emails. I've seen numbers floating around in the hundreds of thousands of deletions over the weekend, and honestly I have no way to verify that figure precisely, but the sentiment was not subtle. This wasn't a quiet grumble. It was loud.
Some of it, sure, was already-simmering stuff, Kalanick's spot on Trump's business advisory council has been a sore point for a while now, and this felt like the moment people who'd been annoyed for weeks finally had a concrete action to take. Deleting an app is such a small, almost silly gesture in the scheme of things. It doesn't undo an executive order. It doesn't get anyone's flight rebooked or their family reunited. But it's the one lever an average person actually has, and apparently a lot of people decided to pull it.
Lyft did the opposite calculation and it worked out well for them, at least in the PR sense. They put out a statement Sunday pledging a million dollars to the ACLU over the next four years. I reinstalled Lyft for the first time in maybe a year. Little bit of a scramble getting my card details back in, the app remembered my email at least, small mercies.
Here's my actual complaint though, separate from all the politics of it: Uber's initial response to the backlash was clumsy in a way that made it worse. There was a company email trying to clarify the surge pricing decision that read like it was written by someone optimizing for "technically accurate" rather than "actually addresses why people are upset." I've sat through enough corporate crisis-comms emails in my life to recognize the genre instantly. If your customers think you crossed a line, the fix is not a paragraph explaining your pricing algorithm.
I don't know how this shakes out longer term. Deleting one app is easy. Whether I actually stick with Lyft once the outrage cools off is a different question, and if I'm honest with myself the deciding factor will probably end up being whichever one shows up faster and cheaper next time I'm standing outside a bar at midnight, which is a pretty unglamorous thing to admit but there it is. Habits are stubborn even when your principles aren't.
One more small thing while I'm here: my Uber account still technically exists somewhere in their systems even after I hit delete on the app itself, because deleting the app icon obviously isn't the same as deleting your account and your ride history and your saved cards. I went digging through the actual account settings to submit a real deletion request through their site, which took a few extra minutes I wasn't expecting. If you're doing this yourself, don't stop at just uninstalling, that part barely matters.
Anyway. Strange weekend. My phone's home screen looks slightly different now, and my thumb keeps tapping the spot where the black icon used to be, out of pure muscle memory, before I remember it's not there anymore.