[ssl-3]

If that's true, then their mobile app team must be both completely separate and isolated from all communications.

Because it's really bad. And it's been bad for a really long time.

When all I want is to order a cheap cup of coffee, I get to stare at a throbbing box of fries while it tries to figure that out.

Get to the restaurant and signal my arrival? More throbbing fries.

Sometimes the fries never stop throbbing and the only way to get away from them and onto the next step is to force-close the app and start it again.

When I manage to accumulate enough points to order a free sandwich? "Sorry, something went wrong!" This leaves me with no sandwich, and no points. (I guess I was going to be disappointed no matter what -- maybe they're doing me a favor by fucking it up so bad that getting the food is impossible, since reaching the melancholy destination takes fewer steps this way.)

Over the years I've used multiple phones, from multiple manufacturers, with multiple carriers. It's not me; the app is consistently bad.

Oh. And speaking of carriers: Back when I had metered service, I used wifi where I could. The McDonald's near where I lived had free wifi, but their network had this app firewalled. It'd work anywhere but inside of the building where it was most useful.

But, yeah: The touchscreen kiosks are a bit more responsive than they initially were. It's too bad that they're gored up with finger grease and other bodily effluences, though, because they barely work with the layer of filth that covers them.

[aidenn0]

I have a half-serious theory that their mobile app is for price discrimination. The best deals are only available in the app, but the experience is so bad that you'll only use it if you really need to.

[canpan]

Here in Japan they started to forward me to the app page when ordering. So you are forced to use the app with a mobile browser. Even though the website could do it perfectly fine in the past.

I do not go often, but if I do I prefer to sit, order in the page and they bring it to your seat. I dont like the Kiosk.

[ssl-3]

Anyone is free to use the app to get the best deals. They just need to be willing to put up with its behavior.

That sounds, to me, less like something discriminatory and more like something that is simply sadistic.

[californical]

Price discrimination is basically corporate speak for giving discounts to those who wouldn’t or couldn’t afford to pay full price.

And it makes perfect sense in this context - if you make $200k salary you probably don’t care enough about a $0.30 discount to fiddle with an app for 5 minutes. But if you’re living on a few dollars of food budget, you probably care a lot about that 30 cents and would fight for it. So making the app bad allows them to segment the market to get an extra 30 cents out of the person who can afford it without excluding the low-budget person.

[ssl-3]

The wealthiest person who I know well would absolutely fiddle with an app for 5 minutes to save 30 cents on a sandwich at McDonald's. He's cheap AF.

But even if he weren't that way, making the app deliberately bad to eek a few more clams out of a subset of people is perverse. Deliberately erecting barriers between the products and those who want to buy them is not how business is successfully done at this level. They aren't selling Ferraris here.

"I want to stick it to these rich guys, so I'll make the app terrible!" doesn't make sense. They're neither smart enough to do that, nor dumb enough.

The simplest explanation is that in a world of shitty software, this software is also just shit. :)

[yunwal]

Seems like you just completely ignored the point.

It’s not about sticking it to the rich guys, it’s about charging them an extra 30 cents.

For McDonalds, that 30 cents might be tripling the margin on that item.

[ssl-3]

I saw your point.

Your point is entirely about sticking it to the rich guys -- for an entire 30 cents. It is based on the presumption that these can't be stuffed to spend time on an app, and you think that this means that the app is deliberately terrible in order to better-succeed at getting those extra 30 cents.

And I understand that 30 cents represents a lot of money in terms of margins.

But I simply reject that line of thinking. It's simply too conspiratorial to be believable, to me.

This is a company that is so incompetent at this point that when they publish video of their CEO eating a new sandwich (sorry, "product"), they can't even get him to act like he's enjoying any part of that.

But it's not about the CEO. For all I know he's an excellent business guy who is working at the top of a company that is dysfunctional in ways that he can't fix (perhaps nobody can fix it), and he just isn't fond of food at all and was more a bigger fan of math classes in school than the arts.

This company can't get the feels of feels-oriented marketing to hit even close to the mark, but they're masters of making an app deliberately terrible to empower subtle, hidden price discrimination to eek a few more pennies out of people?

And that's a good idea -- somehow -- even though it costs them money (someone has to get paid to stand there and take their order) when people don't use the app? Even though when the app is terrible, it costs them money when people do use it because it's just terrible and affects all customers' overall perception? Am I to believe that people of all income levels aren't driven away when an app is awful?

It's not like McDonald's has a monopoly on fast food. It's a competitive market. People have other options.

My buy-in on the idea of price-discrimination-via-terrible-app [because that's a profit center, somehow] is very close to zero.

[slumberlust]

Jokes on them. I'm so sick of apps I just don't eat there anymore. Win win for my gut and wallet!

[voakbasda]

This. Leaning into touch screens and apps were the last straw for me.

[basch]

their app has some very strange flow to it, i cant tell if it feels designed by committee or if there are just so many strange use cases that its somehow the least bad given some arbitrary constraints i cant begin to understand.

even selecting my restaurant is a constant battle. the closest restaurant to my house as the bird flies is not the closest restaurant. even the closest by miles driven involves much more complication than the one i always want to pick. it constantly battles me that i have selected a suboptimal choice. maybe learn that when i am at home, i want to default to my preferred choice, every time, unless i say otherwise.

[plaguuuuuu]

I'm only 50/50 but I swear they have only one app for the entire globe.

Can you imagine how complex that must be vs just making like 100 different apps in each country.

But eCoNoMiEs oF sCaLe

If you're balking at makin 100 different apps, then for reference, I am pretty sure my local mcdonalds - just the one restaurant turns over >10 mill a year, so you get a sense of how much they'd want to invest in, idk, the ordering front-end of every maccas in Australia

[aloisklink]

At least in Japan on iOS, they have their own app, and it’s great.

You can find a seat first, then order directly from your seat, for delivery to your seat (helpful since some McDonald’s in Japan are really busy, and are very vertical, so you might need to climb up some two/three floors to find a seat!).

You can even order McDelivery and they’ll deliver McDonald’s to your house on McDonald’s branded mopeds.

It’s also been pretty fast, even on a slow internet connection.

The only two problems I’ve had with it are:

- Although the menu and the rest of the app is translated to English, sometimes coupons are only in Japanese, and not translated to English (I’m guessing these might be store-specific) (although it’s easy enough to translate that using your phone’s translator) - I’ve had Apple Pay occasionally be down and fail to work, which forced me to redo my whole order, then realize that Apple Pay is still down, then do my entire order again with a different payment method. Although it’s only happened twice a few months ago, so it could be something that they’ve already fixed (or I’m quite unlucky).

Edit: Forgot to add, but no issues like what basch seems to experience with their country’s McDonald’s app. The Japanese one always gives me a sorted list/map view of my closest McDonald’s to pick from, with any favourites marked at the too.

[ssl-3]

That's how it was in the US, too. Sit down anywhere, fire up the app[1], order whatever, enter the table number and they bring it over. That part of the service was consistent and worked well.

The consistency all changed with the covid shuffle.

Now, it depends on the location and their mood at the time. Sometimes, they bring the food out on a tray. Sometimes, they just dismissively put it on the counter at the front in a paper bag and walk away from it without a word. Sometimes they fill the drink for you; sometimes there's a rack of cups and an implied expectation that you just figure it out yourself; sometimes they bring over an empty cup; sometimes you have to beg them for that empty cup. It sucks.

Same with the kiosk. They have these neat table tents with numbers; they're actually BLE beacons that work with tracking hardware inside the ceiling. They help the employees to get a good idea of where you're sitting before they even leave the kitchen. But sometimes there are no table tents to be had (even in an empty restaurant), and sometimes when they do exist nobody gives a damn about them.

As systems, these things work fine. I've seen them work. But I've observed the implementation of them in recent years to have been an unmitigated mess, and this mess is clearly the result of a geographically-diverse problem with bad local-level management.

Buying a cheeseburger and a Coke at McDonald's -- which built an empire around simplicity and efficiency -- should never be an adventure or a guessing game. It should be the most straight-forward process on Earth and completely devoid of surprises.

But it isn't.

[1]: Well, within the app's limitations. I did rant about that in another comment, above.

[xgkickt]

I have been in the situation of standing outside an after-hours pick-up only window at a McDonald’s in the UK, able to talk to the staff, but unable to order because they only accepted app orders and I only had access to the Canadian app.

[ssl-3]

I tried to log into it just now to see which McDonald's it would select for me at home and whether it would be callous about changes.

But when I touched the icon to open the app, a big M appeared on a bright red screen and then it died and returned to the home screen less than half a second later.

(Good work, fellahs! Good work!)

[basch]

do you have the most up to date version?

[ssl-3]

I actually did not. I launched it to again later and it prompted for an update. So I updated it, eventually.

And that sounds easy, except it wasn't:

1. The Play Store should do better at keeping things actually-updated. There was a time when it would check for updates All The Time. Seriously, that thing subscribed to so many broadcsats that it would trigger updates if you breathed on it in the wrong direction. Leave the house and get in the car and thus switch from wifi to cellular? Plug in or unplug it from the charger? Log into it? Time to download and install all updates in parallel! Your phone will get hot, you'll probably be able to watch the battery indicator decrease at a rapid pace, it will turn mostly-unresponsive to the app you actually want to use, and there's a good chance that it will undeniably use metered cellular data for this.

Which, you know: That was ugly way to do things, but at least apps were kept fresh.

But the current Play Store status of "Lol, wut? You want automatic updates? Yeah, naw dawg. Imma just quietly never do that. Yeah I know you turned them on. Nope, I'm not even gonna give you a shortcut to do that with. You can do the updates one at a time, or you can dig into the buried menu for the button to manually update them all right now. Which I could do for you, but get bent buddy," is also ugly.

(In Google's defense, I do only have something like 20GB of free internal storage space. Except: I also have a couple of hundred GB free on the SD card. Also: This 20GB of internal is more than the total [sd+internal] storage space I had on those phones in the irrevocably-parallel-update days.)

So this first one: We'll classify that as a system problem.

And system problems are not McDonald's fault. Except...

2. After I first ran the McDonald's app and it died in a flash, I did try to run it again shortly thereafter. It wouldn't launch again (tapping the icon resulted in nothing happening at all) until I hunted down its ghost and killed that too. Then it ran. And then it rather quickly prompted for an update, which I applied. That was >3 cumulative attempts to get somewhere with it, with all but one of those attempts being things a dumb user who just wants some fast food should never have to do.

So this version of the McDonald's app that had been capable of begrudgingly actually ordering some coffee when I'd last actually used it. But later, this same version had somehow become incapable of even prompting for an update. This lead me to a choice: I could choose to either give up, or choose to dance around with it and make it work. That's bad.

And since the McDonald's app lives within a system that doesn't reliably deliver automatic updates, and it demonstrably fails to thrive in this condition, then that leads me to conclude the following:

Both things are McDonald's fault. None of these conditions were handled with grace.

Unless the goal actually is sadistic (wherein the suffering is the whole point), then all of this business could have been handled smoothly from within the McDonald's app as a continuous and informative flow from the first launch.

Other apps manage to do this. This one does not.

Score: 0.

[rstuart4133]

I gave up on the app completely when I placed an order via the app, was waved past the payment window, then the order window denied it was placed (and paid for). I showed them the phone with the order number still on it. They said it could be a screenshot. After arguing for a while, I drove away without food.

I eventually got a refund after digging throw their web site for an email address, and emailed them the statement showing where it has been paid. With the back and forward while they asked for evidence, it took over an hour of my time in the end to get the refund. It wasn't the money. It was the principle.

The app is by far the slowest, most unreliable way to place an order with them. Period. The next slowest (although far better) is the kiosks. They also unreliable when the printer doesn't work (which is most of the time), and you make the mistake of forgetting the receipt number. Other fast food outlets have solved this problem by getting you to enter your name. That's beyond McDonalds apparently. The fastest, and most reliable way by far is to talk to a human.

The order should be the reverse. It is beyond me how they get it so badly wrong. Maybe price discrimination is the reason. Nothing else makes much sense for an organisation of the size and resources of McDonalds.

[a2128]

I've never once been able to use the McDonald's app over several years and multiple devices. I originally wanted to check the nutritional info of the menu. Download our app, it says. This website is better in our app, it says. The order screen constantly asks me to enter my app code. Collect points in our App! Do you have our App? I give in and finally download the App. "Something's not quite right", you didn't install our app properly (Aurora Store instead of Google Play), you didn't set up your device properly (unlocked bootloader), you did something wrong to upset the App and it will not run. Oh no, we can't let you see the number of calories in your burger with an unlocked bootloader!!! This stupid app has stricter protection than any of my banking apps and I will never be able to escape constantly being asked to use it

[voakbasda]

You will stop being asked when you give up McDonalds. There is no other way out.

[retired]

Why not use the website?

[jd3]

The US app is still laggy (even on the iPhone 17 Pro) and constantly logs you out. My theory is that they set the login timeout to a low number to make it harder to accrue points.

[Itoldmyselfso]

Their app also blocks the use of it on GrapheneOS, for no proper reason.

[notamario]

For a while, you could call the mobile api to submit an order with a price of your choosing. No validation.