German Millennial here, I'd much prefer an app to having to call someone. I hate calling anyone, and I know I'm not alone there. Let me text or use an app and I'm in.
I walk to restaurants if I can to avoid using Wolt for instance.
Then again, I appreciate that AI is probably a better driver than 60% of taxi drivers.
I also dislike ordering food by phone for practical reasons. Call quality might be bad, person's accent might be hard for me to understand, I might be hard for them to understand, the chance an error will go unnoticed even if they read back the order is higher than a website where I can read it myself, and in many cases I have to give a credit card number to a person, which has a higher probability of leading to fraud than most online payments in 2025.
But I have to admit it is a thing that is actively happening and that “phone culture” such as it was, is dying or already dead.
I feel like I have strayed far from the topic, but honestly if this is what smartphones have wrought, we should stop using them. (Sent from my iPhone of course)
I'd advise therapy to anyone who has so much phone anxiety they would hesitate to call emergency services in an emergency or who misses out on significant opportunities as a result. A mere preference for ordering food delivery on a screen driven by social anxiety does not rise to the level of a problem in my mind. Nearly everyone is irrational about something, usually several somethings.