20,000 Taxi Rides in Cuba: What I Learned Building on Organic Maps

I am a 39yo developer in Cuba. I built a ride-hailing app from scratch — not by coding everything from zero, but by taking Organic Maps, stripping it down to its bones, generating my own maps from OpenStreetMap data, and adding a lightweight backend. The app completed over 20,000 real taxi rides during a fuel crisis, with phones that have 1GB RAM and intermittent 2G signals. This is the technical story of how I did it. The Core Architecture (Before We Dive In) Before explaining the challenges, h