Totally different requirements. Some countries' fast food apps are for mobile ordering and delivery, some are a giant collection of coupons, and some are only for nutritional information. And some are just for promotional activities (only used for various promotional calendars.) After seeing all the different APKs I tried out a few for different countries out of curiosity and at least for Burger King they were entirely different applications with completely different use cases. To cram them all into one global app would be an enormous mess.
I think fast food chains are generally not actually owned by the same parent company. A company in India is licensing the Burger King branding and presumably some of the recipes from Burger King USA, rather than being a subsidiary thereof.
This is the real reason. For instance, McDonald's in India is itself run by two companies, one for North and West India, and another for South and East India.
Starbucks has a separate China app. I suspect a part of this is due to app size because there are regions specific SDKs. Another is likely security. Regulations in some countries require data to be shared with the government and they don't want SDKs that collect this data to be included in more privacy focused regions.
eBay is one that comes to mind right away (unless they changed it recently).
Google Pay is another one. They have a dedicate app in Singapore.
It seems like a lot of them went to single apps when they realized they could download data packs within the app. Stuff like Rick Steves guided tour apps used to be separate per city, but now it's a single app where you download the data for a certain city.
But I think you're right that all the major FAANG apps are single-binary.
>Do you have some examples? Genuinely curious. To my knowledge, most of the major FAANG apps are single-binary.
Worked on iOS app size at a FAANG for a couple of years -- this is untrue. At the very least there are different binaries for watch vs iPhone architectures.
Why? I have no idea.