Mcdonald's HK app has 1M+ Downloads, but it's the worst app I have ever seen

3 points by tsejerome97 5 years ago | 2 comments

Mcdonald's Hong Kong app has 1M+ Downloads on Play Store, but it is the worst app I have ever seen.

I tried to get a Mcdonald [1] order for my family earlier this morning, when I download and start using the app I encounter these issues: - Got 1 error prompt out of each 3 button click, technically all basic features, from onboarding users to ordering food have bugs - Weird UX, e.g. they embed the iOS Style Picker within the page, with full width, making it really hard to scroll [2] - Took like 15 minutes to fill in a 2 mins form due to bugs (This normally kills 60% of the conversion)

It is commonly thought that a good platform-ish app should be having great UX, stable tech and of course delivering business value. I cannot believe that an app that is built by a big corporate has such bad QA on UX and tech, there are 10+ app features inside but none of them is really ready for production. Usually this happens when seniors are rushing to launch an app and telling the team not to care about good UX and QA. As a developer I feel quite sad about it because we are always told to deliver great products.

It is also highly possible that Mcdonald's HK App has bought the downloads and reviews, below is my hypothesis and assumptions. More in comments :D

tsejerome97 5 years ago |

Mcdonald's HK App should have lots of people talking about it in HK, but I have never heard anyone mentioning about Mcdonald's App. As there are 1 Million downloads shown on the play store statistics and as there are around 8 Million people in Hong Kong, it means there are 1 out of 8 people downloading Mcdonald's HK app (excluding iOS). And given the assumptions suggested from Statista [3], HK has 91% smart phone market penetration rate, and iOS:Android ratio should be around 4:6 (which should be 7:3 from my personal experience). It could mean that 1 out of 4 people in HK will have this app downloaded, either on iOS or Android, but I haven't heard from any of my network even mentioning this app. (Note: This app is meant for localization as its main feature is for local delivery + the name of the app itself)

A usual case for half of your friends to mention the app can already be achieved when there is around 100K - 500K Android Downloads. Two good examples are ZA Bank[4] & LIHKG[5], ZA Bank has only 100K+ Downloads on HK Play Store, yet I hear at least 30% of my network talking about it, 70% for LIHKG. This is why I kinda conclude that Mcdonald's Hong Kong has bought certain amount of downloads.

Adding on to this, when I'm checking the reviews on play store, I see that 80% of the 1-2 stars reviewers are local and more than 90% the 5 stars reviewers are non-local, concluding that they are buying 5 stars review.

It seems like Mcdonald's Hong Kong's company rather spends a lot of budget to (they also did lots of promotion like giving out Dispenser for orders more than HK$60), instead of spending the same budget/ part of the budget to improve the app.

Extra Read: [1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mcdonalds.... [1]: https://i.imgur.com/hfU3fNT.png [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/953589/hong-kong-apple-s... [3]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zhongan.ib... [4]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lihkg.app&...

neximo64 5 years ago |

iOS app is fine