[javagram]

The app makes it so your food is ready soon after you arrive. You can spend all the time browsing the menu and ordering before arriving at the physical location and then the food is already prepared or is made upon your arrival.

Apps are used rather than PWA websites because most users find it difficult to save a mobile website to their homepage and mobile web push notifications etc add extra friction compared to native apps.

[yonaguska]

Apps are used for data collection and marketing via notifications. That's the real value, not saving time for the user. The user is rewarded with the ability to avoid lines and targeted discounts.

[PaulHoule]

I just typed "taco" in the search bar of Safari and the second autocomplete result was for the restaurant 1.7 miles from me, the third was for the tacobell.com. Easy!

In contrast I struggle to find apps installed on my iPad because the icons look all the same. Apple has a leg up on Android but for me Apple's icons are mainly forgettable or meaningless and most icons from third parties are a forgettable stylized letter, forgettable anime character, or abstract icon. The colors on the default background often obscure the edges of some icons so I find it hard to spot even icons I use a lot.

As a result I hide as many Apple icons as I can (What's the difference between the App Store, Apple Store, and iTunes store?) and avoid installing apps because each app I install makes it harder to find the ones I really use. The Taco Bell app would be brand destroying for me because I'd keep seeing it get in the way of finding the app I really need and would be popping up irrelevant and annoying notifications at all the wrong times -- you just don't want people associating your brand with petty annoyances.

There is no reason it needs to be a PWA. People had plain ordinary web sites to order food online a decade using cgi-bin and the equivalent before there were things like Angular and React.

[jdminhbg]

You found a link to tacobell.com, that's great, but you're like 1/10 of the way there now. You have to open it, load all the resources, give it permission to use your location so you can find which store to order from, place the order, enter your payment information, and then move to your email app to get order updates. An app caches all of that locally, has your information saved, is pre-cleared for location permissions, etc.

> People had plain ordinary web sites to order food online a decade using cgi-bin and the equivalent before there were things like Angular and React.

This is true. I wonder if there is any difference in the $ amount of food ordered using iOS/Android apps now vs food ordered using cgi-bin then.

[PaulHoule]

I don't mind the minor inconveniences of the web like approving a location check. My email client provides very good tools for dealing with spam, notifications and spam notifications. If a brand wants to make their web site load excessive resources that is their loss because the site will be slow and drive people to another brand.

Back in the day people were much less into the e-commerce habit and not using mobile technology so they weren't ordering food on the go.

Another question is "What relationship to people have to fast food?"

I worked at a company that did geospatial analysis such as retail location selection. We had a theory that people chose fast food because they were on the way from point A to point B so the right way to think about it was not about the density of commercial or residential development in an area but rather about the density of trips that pass by a point. I was involved in a pilot project to use touchscreens to collect data at the POS just before the mobile age made it possible to collect trip data directly.

Thus my consumption of fast food is opportunistic: I eat at Taco Bell sometimes because it is in a neighborhood with a Wal-Mart, Gamestop, Petsmart, Staples, an illegal cannabis dispensary (not like I can't get better weed elsewhere), award-winning wine store, etc. I get hungry On most days I would go to the street taco stand on the other side of the parking lot. which has the best tacos I've seen outside Los Angeles but if it is Sunday maybe I go to the Bell. It's not like the scene in Demolition Man where Sylvester Stalone goes to a fancy dinner at Taco Bell because "all restaurants are Taco Bell" in the future.

If I am traveling maybe I am driving down the freeway and see a sign for a Burger King and stop. Maybe I walk out of the Oculus at the WTC site and see both a Chopt and a BK and, even though I have a BK gift card in my pocket, the line looks really long at the BK and I go to the Chopt because it is really fast food.

I can see that Taco Bell wants to develop a special relationship with me but I don't want to develop one with Taco Bell. Really I don't find it easy to install an app (until I broke my old iPad, my old iPad insisted that I log in with my Apple account password whenever I wanted to install an app despite the fingerprint scanner working just fine for everything else. I don't know my Apple account password because I keep it in a password manager and the app store was the one thing that would make me require to use it when I am on the go. When I bought a new iPad this cleared up. I go to the Bell maybe 4 times a year, it is just not worth having another app cluttering up my device making it harder to find the apps that really matter to me.

[hluska]

There are solutions to every problem you cited. As an example, you can search on an iPhone.