Here's a comment from awhile back that answers your question:
Re:End of the line for Uber?
by pcthrowaway on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @05:36AM
(#28139928)
For anyone interested in reading more about this, the linked submission seems to be another engineer's perspective of "Uber's crazy YOLO app rewrite, from the front seat" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27267368 (which is much more in-depth, and also not a twitter thread)
Wow! What a wild ride. Thanks for linking to that story, it's fascinating to read about these types of experiences.
My former role was in web development, I've always been stunned that native apps can get away with 100+mb sizes and yet still people complain about a 3mb JS bundle.
My overall reaction is, web development seems like a MUCH better environment to code than app development. Especially with the ability to arbitrarily split and chunk JS.
This especially seems useful to separate out regional features so only those who need it download it. And of course, any code can be cached so users don't have to re-download it.
But they have over 2,000 engineers. That's a massive amount. Are there new features in development? New services? New capabilities?
From a consumer perspective I haven't see anything new in a while. Are they all focused on growth in new cities, towns, and countries supporting local peculiarities? Is Uber going through a rewrite to align on a technology stack to support future features? What are those features?
My old job was building out a (new) streaming service, so it was all about feature development, launching in new countries, supporting local payment methods etc.
Now I work on building APIs for a different company with which other developers can integrate.
Both are focused on building and maintaining new and existing features as well as growth. Just what the heck is Uber doing with its 2,000 engineers?