The Verge:

Later this year, Taco Bell will start accepting orders via smartphone, according to trade publication Nation's Restaurant News. Rather than looking elsewhere for an existing mobile ordering solution, the fast food chain has reportedly spent more than two years perfecting its own system.

Say what you want about Taco Bell’s quality, but I’m impressed that they’re undertaking a fully custom solution for mobile ordering. Based on The Verge’s report, the app sounds pretty awesome, feature-wise. I especially like this aspect:

Taco Bell's app will also use your GPS location to determine when to start heating your food. To ensure that your meal is actually hot, that won't happen until you're nearing the pickup restaurant.

If they use geofencing on iOS devices, this could be a really useful feature while still not negatively effecting battery life by overusing the GPS. I’d love to see other companies start implementing mobile ordering systems with features like these. Namely, I think a mobile ordering system at Starbucks would be incredibly popular. Using the GPS system to know when to make your coffee so that it’s hot and freshly made when you arrive would be great.

Returning to Taco Bell, the features of the app are quite promising, but we’ll see if they deliver on a good, actually useable design. Furthermore, this will add another layer of complexity into the duties of workers in the store. Taco Bell needs to make sure employees are well trained and prepared for the rollout of something like this. I’m hoping since the service is entirely custom, this problem will be avoided.

In contrast, Tapingo, a mobile ordering service which we have on campus at the U of A, has seen problematic rollouts when entering new restaurants. In my experience it has been mostly worked out by this time in the year, but towards the beginning any mobile orders seemed to be of lower priority, and there was no good way to differentiate between people coming to get Tapingo orders and people actually waiting to order, resulting in long waits even though food was ordered early. These are the kind of problems Taco Bell is going to want to avoid.