Building a polished, stable, feature-complete mobile app for the two major platforms generally costs about a million dollars if you want it to be world class. Of course you can reduce scope or polish or pick only one platform, but that's roughly what it takes.
Who's going to pay to develop the apps that these local businesses use to do online ordering, to sway customers away from Uber Eats et al? The reason these organizations are achieving market penetration is because their UX is polished. Yelp made a whole (predatory) business off of small business owners being bad at websites.
I'd love to see it become more decentralized via private arrangements, but there are real costs to entering the market due to software developers not being cheap. I'd also love to see a resurgence in use of the web for such things, but despite being able to bookmark websites to one's homescreen, it's still not quite at the point where using a website feels like an app, and users care a lot about that stuff.
Mobile apps do things that mobile websites can’t, such as integrated payments and geolocation.
1 Where we live Whole Foods in store purchases have been cheaper than Safeway, who they are trying to put out of business Walmart style. Prime home delivery has got very expensive per item (and a lot of the items ordered don't show up, shown as out of stock) in comparison to buying in store.
2 100 years ago it was normal in most Western world countries for small vendors to deliver food to homes. Milkmen in the UK had electric milk floats until the 1980's, delivery bicycles and tricycles were very common until the 1960's, and smaller local vendors almost invariably offered local delivery. I spoke to an Ocardo delivery van guy in February based in Coventry UK who told his route went into Wales 90 miles away. In the US we are consuming incredible amounts of packaging to buy small items from Amazon.
I'm not seeing value in centralizing delivery through large entities via casual delivery people unconnected to the businesses they are delivering from, I see massive profits for a tiny number of people and zero oversight of our private business, what we order and from who. I'd like to see a return to local anonymous delivery via private arrangements with local vendors.
As a seperate topic I'd also like to know that my every move in an Uber/Lyft etc is not being tracked, filed away by God knows who and sold.