China’s top ride-hailing service now embedded inside hundreds of apps

In China, people can now hail a ride from the nation’s top ride-hailing startup without even opening up the app. That’s because Didi Kuaidi has been quietly working on allowing any developer to add a ‘hail a ride’ button inside their apps.

The result, Didi Kuaidi revealed today, is that people can now summon a car from any of over 300 apps. That includes popular apps with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of monthly active users, such as Alibaba’s mobile wallet app Alipay, Alibaba-owned AMAP, Tencent Maps, and Dianping (in which Tencent has a stake). That last one is like China’s answer to Yelp with daily deals mixed in.

The involvement of Alibaba and Tencent is no surprise as both the tech titans have invested money in Didi Kuaidi to fund its battle against arch-rival Uber. Didi Kuaidi – valued at US$16.5 billion – announced earlier this week that its users racked up 1.43 billion rides in 2015, a figure that easily surpassed Uber’s tally of one billion rides in its five-year lifespan.

Uber similarly opened up its API in China last September.

Among the many third-party apps that have embedded Didi hailing is one called MoWeather. Perhaps if rain is forecast, a MoWeather user will want to grab a ride rather than walk to the subway.

Although Didi’s open API is new, the startup will realise from long experience that embedded ride-hailing can give the service a huge boost. Back in January 2014, when Tencent first invested in Didi, it was added to Tencent’s hugely popular WeChat, allowing people to get a ride straight from their favorite messaging app.