I see the 'food delivery app' come up a few times in this thread. Do you really need an app to use such services in some countries? Whenever I want to order a meal for delivery I just go to the restaurant's website, or sometimes look at the list of available restaurants in Thuisbezorgd.nl (part of the company which owns Grubhub etc.) and then visit the restaurant website and order there. If there's something that needs addressing, the restaurant just calls me (which is almost never). I can't imagine installing a bunch of dedicated apps for services which just require my money and some basic interface.

Where I live, the only restaurants that offer delivery are Chinese and Pizza, and this is pretty typical for most locales. What grubhub did was antagonistically create delivery services for literally every restaurant and collect those menus into their own app. If the restaurant doesn't cooperate they will just call the place and pretend to be a customer. They also buy ads so that when you search for <some restaurant delivery> you will get a dynamically generated grubhub page that 'looks official'.

I didn't know that. That's way beyond what Just Eat/Takeaway does in Europe. They have a predatory business model of course; restaurants either join them, or loose customers accustomed to seeing every available delivery option in one place, but if a restaurant doesn't want them, they don't resort to such tricks (I don't think they could without falling foul of some regulations, mainly the issue of reselling a product already taxed in a business to consumer transaction).

A lot of restaurants are fighting back and do join Thuisbezorgd and whatever local iteration Just Eat/Takeaway has, but they also ask their customers to use their own website instead. It saves them a lot of money.

It's a courtesy for the delivery person, so they don't have to ring and wait for you to get to the door. Instead you get a notification when they are getting close to your house (via GPS tracking).

Wow. That's… Totally not done here in the Netherlands.

It's not really an issue either, because doors are typically within a few metres from the street, and people answer fairly promptly when food was ordered (because you are hungry and your food is there, which would seem obvious).

It's a discoutesy to the customer to spam them with notifications after the order is complete.

Give them 1* reviews for it, and encourage everybody you know to do likewise. It doesn't take that many of them to ruin somebody's day at the producer.

It's not just some apps - it's all the major apps, including Google software.

For sure there are some apps that abuse the system but most are quite good with it. And I can say that e.g. Doordash and Uber Eats both give you granular control over notifications related to your delivery updates, Uber actually gives you about a dozen categories of alerts.

I just watch the map. I forgot the app I use even has notifications since I turned them off long ago.

And some apps (like Play Store) just have too many to wade through - pages and pages, with labels which in some cases aren't obvious as to what they do. The kitchen-sink overload is equally problematic.