Uber Eats: Food Delivery for iPhone

Dining on easy street

UberEATS is a free app from Uber, the company which provides a now world-famous transportation service of the same name. It focuses on providing delicious, fast and efficient delivery service by connecting restaurants and customers with its own fleet of drivers. It boasts a flat delivery fee, and compared to Uber, there's no surge pricing.

The devilish details of delivery

Since surge pricing is one of the most controversial features of Uber, then, it becomes interesting that EATS doesn't use it. While Uber has deliberated changes to surge pricing in their main app, it simply does not exist on EATS. Instead, the app acclimates to each region it delivers to in a process called "machine learning", and prices are set accordingly across the board. The result makes EATS competitive with other delivery services, which often have flat or nearly flat delivery fees themselves.

So how else does it compete? Simple: it has a niche. On EATS, you won't find the dizzying array of options you might see on other apps. Instead, you will see restaurants that are closer by. Depending on what a restaurant serves, it might be available closer or farther from its location. EATS's drivers then focus on fast delivery. The end result is that you should never find yourself eating lukewarm pizza or a worn-down cake, but it may not be from your favorite restaurant.

Food in review

The specifics of the service UberEATS provides might tickle your fancy or have you doing a double-take, depending on how you dine. One thing that is for sure, however, is that the app itself is no slouch.

Although originally EATS was integrated with the Uber app itself, perhaps to increase adoption, it was out-of-the-way, and more to the point, it looked more like an in-house operation with a sparse menu and more fresh fruit or water than meals. Things have changed since then: the app knows how to present restaurants to diners. From a price range provided in dollar designs, to mouth-watering images of each restaurant's food, EATS looks, feels and works like a well-designed dining app.

On the more muddy side, UberEATS drivers can be reviewed as well, but this uses a system of thumbs up versus thumbs down, as opposed to Uber's more detailed driver reviewing process. As some users have reported problems with, for example, drivers refusing to approach their doorways with the food, this is a feature to keep an eye on.

Eat with your eyes, but also your mind

Overall, UberEATS is as much a service as it is an app. And in the particular market it targets, an advantage to one diner could be a problem with the app for another. With that in mind, it's best to check Uber's website and see if it delivers a decent selection to your address. If it does, and you already have a delivery service or two you use, you might give this one a try – there's nothing to lose from more options, and UberEATS's list of them is fast growing.