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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?

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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.