Lyft now grabs destinations from your calendar, custom shortcuts to follow soon

Ride hailing app Lyft can now poll your calendar for suggested destinations right within the app itself, thanks to a new integration option being rolled out starting today. And coming soon, it’s going to let you specify your own shortcut destination options, in addition to “Home” and “Work,” letting you easily enter frequently visited spots so you don’t have to manually type them in every time.

The calendar integration launching today will pull in event addresses listed in your appointments from Google and native device calendars, and requires only a one-time approval of the integration before you start seeing upcoming event spots as destination suggestions in-app.

Even if you’re not crazy about allowing Lyft’s app access to your address book, you can still add those custom shortcuts soon, which will let you store destinations for repeated use within Lyft itself. All of which leads to less friction, which is better for Lyft in terms of usage rates in the end, of course.

Uber added calendar integration and destination suggestions to its app earlier this month, and will likely follow Lyft soon with custom destination options, because these companies are engaged in a never-ending war of feature parity and oneupmanship thanks to that wonderful force we call free market competition.