Services · Mobile app development · Taxi booking apps
Codeeo delivers taxi booking app development Edinburgh firms can own outright: passenger, driver and dispatch software for taxi companies and private hire car operators licensed by the City of Edinburgh Council. It handles everyday residents, festival crowds and visitors arriving at the airport or Waverley, and it follows Scottish licensing rather than rules written for England.
Scotland licenses taxis and private hire cars under the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982, with its own terms, its own conditions and Scots law behind any contract. An app copied from an English product often gets small things wrong. We start from how Edinburgh works, then design every screen around it.
200+ companies servedFrom a first store to an ADX listed developer
Inside the app
Edinburgh is a compact capital with an unusual rhythm. For most of the year, trips are residents going to work, hospital appointments at the Royal Infirmary, students heading home late, and business travellers moving between the West End, the airport and Leith. Then August arrives, the festivals fill the city, and demand changes almost overnight. Hogmanay and rugby internationals at Murrayfield bring the same pressure in shorter bursts.
Taxi app developers Edinburgh operators have worked with in the past have often supplied a general product designed elsewhere. We build around local realities instead: the capped taxi fleet, purpose-built accessible cabs, private hire cars licensed separately, Old Town streets where a car cannot always stop at the door, and the Low Emission Zone enforced since June 2024. Below is what we usually include.
A console switch for busy periods that changes booking windows, adds pre-booked return trips from venues, and sets pickup points away from closed or crowded streets. Passengers see realistic waiting times instead of optimistic ones, which protects your reputation when every car is already on a job.
The busiest weeks of the year stop overwhelming the controllers.
Closes, wynds and pedestrian areas around the Royal Mile and Grassmarket confuse map pins. The app suggests named pickup points near the passenger, lets them add a note such as a hotel entrance, and shows the driver the agreed spot rather than a raw GPS location. Saved favourites mean regular passengers never repeat the note.
Fewer calls asking where the driver is.
Flight numbers for Edinburgh Airport arrivals, train times for Waverley and Haymarket, waiting allowances and meet and greet notes are captured at booking. Drivers receive the details with the job, and passengers get a message telling them exactly where to find their car.
Visitors start their stay without hunting for a ride.
Edinburgh taxis are generally purpose-built wheelchair accessible cabs, while private hire cars vary. The app lets passengers say what they need, routes the request only to suitable vehicles, and follows WCAG 2.2 so people using screen readers or switch controls can book alone.
Accessible trips reach the right vehicle every time.
Taxis can be hailed and ply for hire, while private hire cars must be booked in advance. Firms running both can offer each as its own product, with its own fares, its own driver pool and its own records, so passengers always know what they have booked. Reporting keeps the two apart as well.
Each licence type keeps its own rules inside one app.
Driver and vehicle profiles store the licence issued by the City of Edinburgh Council or a neighbouring Lothian authority, expiry dates, inspection results and emissions status. Dispatch blocks drivers whose documents have lapsed and flags vehicles that should not enter the Low Emission Zone.
Compliance checks happen before the job, not after.
Universities, NHS contractors, law firms and offices in the city centre often book on account. We add approved bookers, cost codes, named passengers and monthly statements, plus recurring trips for regular appointments. Account clients see their own booking history in a web portal, and finance teams download invoices without phoning the office.
Steady weekday account work alongside public demand.
Many festival visitors and tourists come from abroad and expect to pay by phone. Card, Apple Pay and Google Pay run through a PCI compliant provider, receipts can be emailed in a format suited to expense claims, and account customers receive monthly invoices. Adding a language later is a content task, not a rebuild.
No awkward moments at the end of a trip.
English by default, with translation files ready for the languages your visitors use most. Notifications, booking confirmations and safety messages follow the phone's language, while the driver app stays in English for consistency across your fleet.
International visitors can book without guessing.
Edinburgh trips are often short and frequent, so the driver app keeps acceptance quick, shows the next likely job nearby, and keeps earnings by shift visible. Document renewals, shift availability and messages to the office live in the same app.
Drivers spend more time carrying passengers and less time tapping.
Who this is for
Edinburgh has a small number of large taxi companies, many independent drivers, and private hire firms of every size from a few cars to a sizeable fleet. Some also cover Midlothian, East Lothian and West Lothian, where different councils issue the licences. Student trips around the universities, hospital runs and tourist demand all add to the mix. These are the situations where a custom app makes the clearest difference.
Your firm has served the city for years, your phone line is busy and your drivers know every street, but your app lags behind what passengers now expect. We rebuild it with live tracking, saved places, wallet payments and accessible booking, while keeping the dispatch habits your controllers rely on. Existing account customers move across with their history intact.
We migrate accounts in a planned order so no customer is left without a way to book.
Private hire numbers in the city are not capped in the way taxi licences are, so firms can grow, but competition is intense. A branded app with fair advance pricing, reliable airport transfers and strong safety features helps you win and keep regular customers rather than competing only on price. Drivers also get a clean app that makes your firm the one they prefer to work for.
Your drivers hold licences from different councils and your trips cross between the city and surrounding towns. We store the issuing authority on every driver and vehicle record and let your compliance lead set dispatch rules for which licences can take which bookings, so cross-boundary work stays within the conditions that apply. Reports then show how much of your work starts outside the city boundary.
Rules are configured with you; we do not give legal advice on licensing.
You book cars for guests, performers or tour groups and want that to happen inside your own system. We build a booking portal or an integration into your existing tools, connected to one or more licensed operators, with named passengers, pickup notes and consolidated invoices for the business.
Trips are fulfilled by licensed operators; the portal only arranges them.
Working with us
We do not have an office in Scotland. Our team of 80+ works from Dubai, Riyadh and Karachi and works remotely with Edinburgh clients, running discovery, design reviews and sprint demos by video call. Most firms begin with a fixed scope first release, then keep a smaller team on a monthly retainer for updates and seasonal improvements. We have delivered 200+ projects across the UAE and the US and are rated 4.7 from 23 Google reviews. If you already have a developer for your website or accounts, we coordinate with them directly. Contracts can be drafted to suit Scots law where your firm prefers that.
A defined build with a deadline
We agree what the product has to do, write it down with a price and a date, and build exactly that. Changes are priced before they are made, not discovered on the invoice.
A product that keeps evolving
Named engineers who work your hours, join your standups and stay on the codebase. You direct the backlog; we own the quality of what ships.
Something live that needs looking after
A monthly block of hours for improvements, fixes and the small requests that otherwise wait months. Unused hours carry for a quarter.
Technology
We generally build cross platform apps for iOS and Android, with a cloud backend hosted in a UK region. Maps, payments and messaging come from established providers chosen with you, and every account is opened in your firm's name from the first day. Load testing is planned around August and Hogmanay rather than an ordinary weekday.
01Mobile
02Data and cloud
03Marketing and tracking
Licensing law, terminology and some conditions are different.
Scotland uses the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982, speaks of private hire cars rather than private hire vehicles, and each council sets its own conditions. English rules such as the Deregulation Act 2015 subcontracting provisions do not simply carry across. We design the booking records, terms and dispatch rules for the Scottish framework, and your licensing adviser confirms the details that depend on your own conditions. Your passenger terms are also written for a Scottish operator, which avoids references to English legislation that confuse customers and licensing officers alike.
Schedule a free consultation and get a written recommendation, with costs, before you commit to anything.
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