[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.

[hluska]

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