Yeah, I've been traveling in Asia for about 5 months now...and well, Grab just bought out Uber last month... so we can't even use Uber anymore. But BEFORE that...I had the same issue as you.

This happened to me more than once...and yep, it's definitely not like what you expect. Because like you said...we use it to avoid having to negotiate with local taxis who tend to triple the price on you,etc, or they don't have a smartphone with gps so it's hard to tell them where you want to go.

Maybe try grab...so far I haven't had anyone try to make me pay extra. But I have had a lot of poeple cancel because maybe they don't want to pick me up for that amount of $ or something.