Similarity between Airbnb and other non STR platforms

[Inna22]

I used Taskrabbit the other day and was fascinated at how similar the platforms are. I hired a no reviews tasker who completely misrepresented his experience. I had to get support involved. Same lingo: we are just a technology company putting two people together (hmm- why can't I have the taskers contact info if that's  the case). They have some sort of smile cover or whatever it is called similar to air cover. The terms we clearly written by the same person. Overall design of the platform and functionality were a total de ja vu. They somehow manage to learn the worst from each other. Or perhaps it is the same group of people moving from one company to another.

[Pat271]

TL;DR: Those not curious about marketing and technical details can skip this.

There may be a variety of things going on when you see 2 similar interfaces, some of which you have mentioned. Here are a couple of additional possibilities:

1) In the process of developing code, there are code modules available these days that you can just plug in to your development framework. That way, a developer does not have to rewrite commonly-used internal functions and external user interfaces. It’s possible that Taskrabbit and Airbnb are using some of the same publicly-available libraries.

2) When vast amounts of users use a particular product, the product’s interface can often become a defacto standard. Some software shops will adapt some of the interface behaviors of their product to resemble a wildly popular one, for a few reasons: a) to sell ease of use, as customers are already familiar with it, and/or b) for marketing purposes, since people are drawn to that which is familiar to them. This is where patents and copyrights come into play, to protect against another entity capitalizing on a company’s popular ideas and designs.

It could also be as you mentioned: the 2 companies are in some sort of strategic partnership, with a future goal of Airbnb taking over Taskrabbit.