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

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.

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.

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.

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!)

do you have the most up to date version?

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.