You have food delivery apps on your phone. Should you delete them?
The Short Answer
Probably. Food delivery apps reduce the friction between impulse and consumption to nearly zero. With two taps, any food arrives at your door. This is exactly the wrong environment for someone trying to change their eating. Deleting the apps doesn’t mean you can never order delivery: you can always reinstall or use a browser. It just adds friction that can interrupt impulse orders. That friction is the point.
Something to Sit With
How many of your delivery orders were truly necessary? How many were hunger, and how many were boredom, stress, or convenience?
The app makes ordering easy. Maybe ordering should be a little harder.
Learn More
The friction principle. Small increases in effort can reduce how often people eat: the proximity work found a moderate effect on low-certainty evidence, with distance raising perceived effort rather than salience.[1],[2]
Food delivery apps remove almost all friction. Your payment is saved. Your address is stored. Your past orders are one tap away. In moments of weakness (tiredness, stress, boredom), ordering takes almost no effort.
Every impulse order is a sale for the app, not a gain for you.
What apps enable. Consider what becomes possible with a delivery app installed:
Impulse eating. A craving leads immediately to food. There’s no cooling-off period, no drive to the restaurant, no time to reconsider.
Deciding by default. When you’re too tired to think about food, the app decides for you, often toward options that are high in calories and low in nutrition. Decision fatigue is the contested name for that; the app wins either way.[3]
Late-night availability. Many restaurants close; apps don’t. The danger zone of 10pm to midnight is fully serviced.
Visual temptation. Opening the app exposes you to photos of hyperpalatable food.[4] Even if you meant to order something healthy, you see the burgers, the pizza, the desserts.
Habitual ordering. The app tracks your habits and makes re-ordering trivially easy. What started as occasional becomes routine.[5]
The deletion argument. Removing the apps doesn’t remove the capability to order food. It just requires reinstallation or using a web browser, enough friction to interrupt many impulse orders.
The logic: if you really want delivery, you can still get it. But you’ll have to want it enough to take deliberate steps. The impulse that would have led to an order in 30 seconds may fade in the 5 minutes it takes to reinstall an app.
This is environmental design, the approach Guyenet advises: arrange your surroundings, in a moment of clarity, so that tempting food takes effort to reach.[6]
When to keep them. Some people use delivery apps appropriately: planned orders from restaurants serving food that fits their eating approach. If that’s genuinely your pattern, deletion may not be necessary.
But be honest: Is the app serving your goals, or is it serving your impulses? The usage history tells the truth.
Alternative approaches. If deletion feels too extreme:
Move the app off the home screen. Adding a few taps of friction helps.
Set a cooling-off rule. Decide to wait 20 minutes before completing any order. Many cravings pass.
Remove saved payment. Having to enter payment information manually can be enough friction to stop some impulse orders.
Keep only delivery apps for healthy restaurants. If a healthy meal prep service has an app, keep that. Delete the pizza apps.
The test. Try deleting the apps for two weeks. Notice what changes. If nothing significant changes, you weren’t using them problematically. If the change is hard, you’ve learned something important about your relationship with those apps.
Further reading:
- Clear J, Atomic Habits[7] (2018) — Chapters on friction and habit design
- Eyal N, Hooked[8] (2014) — How apps are designed to create habitual use
- Thaler RH & Sunstein CR, Nudge[9] (2008) — Behavioral design and choice architecture
Written by AI, directed and approved by me. How this is made →