If becoming a driver is so easy, what about security for passengers? I'm from a city that has been known to be "dangerous", and the main reason I use Uber there over taxis is for security. How does LibreTaxi prevent bad actors from becoming drivers?

Uber is not inherently safer than a taxi. Why do people always say this?

It's not inherently safer but Uber does do things that most taxi companies don't that help improve safety, albeit slightly. Really basic things like providing the user with a photo of the driver and a description of the car including license plate so the user can be sure (well, more sure) that the car that arrived is the car they requested.

As far as I'm aware (in my experience) the only way you can compare the taxi driver's face to their license is by getting in to the back of the car, where the license photo is visible.

It doesn't. That's one of the differences between a platform and a service. When I deal with someone from Craigslist I can't really know in advance if the person is legit, but I can be prepared for the possibility that they aren't. I don't think you'll be waiting long for the option for people to flag shady drivers.

I don't think that's true. You can achieve a lot with just react, css, node and the electron APIs. With enough effort and attention to detail you can make an app look and feel native with css (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIRXVGVPzn8), V8 is not /that/ slow, and you have the advantage of using multiple node processes inside electron to offload work. And it's cross platform. Yes, the built apps might end up being big, but that's a trade off I'm willing to take in favor of developing cross platforms apps with a modern and familiar web stack.

This is really awesome-- At Nylas we've /also/ been building one for the past year to use in our email composer inside N1 (https://githbub.com/nylas/n1), with the additional constraint that it needs to support extension by third party plugins.

Building a nice declarative editing interface around an inherently mutable structure with an imperative API like the DOM (which can mutate state from under you, like focus) is a real challenge. Props to the team at facebook for this.