EASI - Food Delivery

The First Thing You Notice: The App Loads, Then the Wait Begins

Open the app, and you see a grid of restaurants. The interface is simple. No flashy animations, no onboarding tutorial. Just a search bar, a list of categories, and a few promotional banners. Tap a restaurant, pick your food, and place the order. That part takes about two minutes. Then the real experience starts. You get a confirmation screen with an estimated delivery time. That time is almost never accurate. Orders that claim 30 minutes regularly take over an hour. Some take two hours. The tracking map shows a driver assigned, but the driver's location sometimes doesn't update for long stretches. You watch the little car icon stay in one place while your food sits at the restaurant. This is the core problem that defines the app. The ordering process works. The delivery process often does not.

The app itself runs without major crashes on most devices. It saves your address and payment details. It remembers your favorite restaurants. The technical foundation is solid enough for basic e-commerce. But the logistics layer is where things fall apart. Drivers are not always available. When they are, they sometimes pick up multiple orders from different restaurants before delivering yours. This is not an app bug. It is a business model choice. The app prioritizes restaurant partnerships over delivery speed. The result is cold food and frustrated customers.

The Commission Trap: Why Low Fees Mean Slow Delivery

EASI charges restaurants between 15% and 25% per order. Uber Eats charges up to 30% in the same market. That 5-15% difference is EASI's main selling point to merchants. It is also the reason delivery takes so long. The lower commission leaves less money for driver incentives. Drivers on EASI earn less per delivery than they would on competing platforms. Fewer drivers are willing to work for EASI. The ones who do work are often handling multiple apps simultaneously. They accept an EASI order, then accept a higher-paying Uber Eats order, and deliver the Uber order first. This is not speculation. It is a direct consequence of the pricing structure. The app cannot force drivers to prioritize its orders. It can only offer what it can afford. And what it can afford is less than what Uber pays.

The A$50 million acquisition by HungryPanda in January 2022 did not fix this. The acquisition was about market share, not operational efficiency. HungryPanda wanted EASI's restaurant network and its Australian user base. The delivery logistics remained largely unchanged. The court case that followed — HungryPanda won a A$24.6 million payout after EASI allegedly broke contract terms — suggests deeper structural issues. The app's parent company has had to spend money on legal battles instead of driver pay. The delivery speed has not improved. The complaints about 2-hour wait times are as common now as they were before the acquisition.

App Glitches and the "Check Your Network" Loop

The app has technical problems that are separate from delivery speed. Users report that the help section sometimes fails to load. Messages to support go unanswered for days. The order tracking map occasionally freezes. A user in one review said they had to restart the app multiple times just to see if their order was assigned to a driver. The app does not handle poor network conditions well. It shows a generic error message when the connection is slow. The error does not tell you what is wrong. You have to guess whether the problem is your internet, the restaurant's system, or the app's servers. This lack of diagnostic information is a consistent theme in the complaints. The app expects you to figure out the problem yourself.

Another issue is the cancellation process. If you want to cancel an order, the app does not always allow it. Some users report that the cancel button is grayed out after a certain point. You have to contact support, and support is slow to respond. By the time they reply, the food is already prepared or being delivered. You end up paying for food you did not want. The app's own reviews contain multiple variations of this story. The pattern is clear: the app handles the easy parts well and the hard parts poorly. Ordering is easy. Fixing problems is hard.

The Final Detail: The App Does Not Save Your Order History Properly

A minor but persistent technical flaw: the app does not reliably save your order history. Users have reported that past orders sometimes disappear from the history tab. This makes reordering difficult. You have to search for the restaurant again and rebuild your cart from scratch. The app does not sync this data across devices either. If you switch phones, your order history does not carry over. The app stores your payment methods, but not your past orders. This is not a dealbreaker for most users, but it is an unnecessary friction point. The feature exists. It just does not work consistently. The app's version changelog does not mention fixing this issue. The developer has not published specific details about recent updates. The only update note available is a generic statement about improving service. The order history problem remains unfixed.