Could you say what those are? I agree you don't need to ride roughshod on regulations to be innovative.
Of course many taxi companies will have their own apps.
While the taxiphone app is branded Geneva it also works in other cities. Basically, it is a locally branded app but the infra is in 42 cities/regions and works in the "foreign" ones.
Uber is a bit cheaper during the night, but not always during the day and certainly not during rush hours in the city center.
Address search could be a bit better but otherwise it is as good as the uber one. At least it doesn't have this annoying inbuilt Dev recruitment tool, that stupidity almost ruined the day of a blind developer I know.
When booking a ride ahead of time e.g. to the airport with family the taxiphone website is best. You can arrange child seats etc.. and they will have them and arrive on time.
All the major companies, perhaps the top 10 - have apps with pre-paying and hailing or pre-booking in the app.
I haven't called a taxi by phone or hailed one on the street for years. I can't find when the first company launched their app, but I'm pretty sure I hadn't heard the name Uber when they did (which doesn't mean Uber weren't first - just that I hadn't heard of them because they didn't exist in Sweden then).
There are obviously no taxi medallions or similar, so anyone is free to start a taxi service and the cost for doing so is low. Usually you'd join one of the bigger players to be connected to a booking central and app service but you can just get a license and start driving.
So the bottom line is - in ANY city where there isn't a US-style medallion bureaucracy surrounding taxis I just don't see the point of Uber. Uber is Taxi. If there are 100 taxi companies with apps, then with Uber they are 101.
US cities (and others worldwide) should just buy back all medallions at the last transfer price and then allow free competition.