Foursquare Partners With Delivery.com to Offer Food Delivery in 36 Cities

You'll have to switch between the two apps to accomplish this, however.

Foursquare is dipping its toe into the food delivery sphere: Thanks to a new partnership with delivery.com, users in 36 U.S. cities can now more easily order food (plus alcohol and even groceries) from places they've discovered via the Foursquare app.

As the Verge explains, "If users are in one of delivery.com's 36 serviced cities in the US, they can just open up the Foursquare app, look for where the delivery site's icon appears next to stores and restaurants, and tap to make an order. Although information on what's being sold and for how much can be viewed directly within the Foursquare app, users will have to switch to delivery.com's own app (and install it) before they can actually buy anything."

Delivery.com already services around 40 cities via its own website and mobile app and claims to have more than a million users, but the Foursquare partnership will presumably open it up to an even bigger audience.

While Foursquare used to be more of a social-centric app focused on check-ins, in 2014 it split that functionality off into a separate app called Swarm. These days, Foursquare posits itself as a "local discovery app" and functions a lot like Yelp, with a focus on personalized restaurant recommendations and user reviews. The company is clearly hoping its new delivery feature will help it better compete with Yelp, which offers in-app delivery capabilities via Eat24, but of course only time will tell how many Foursquare users will actually want to bother with installing a whole new app.

According to a press release from Delivery.com, the Foursquare integration was facilitated by a mobile commerce platform called Button, which also has partnerships with companies such as Uber and Airbnb.

The already-crowded food delivery market is currently expanding at a breakneck pace, with heavy-hitters like Amazon and Uber now competing with established players such as Seamless and scrappy newcomers like Postmates and DoorDash. Is this bubble destined to burst like any other, or can Americans' reliable laziness and love of convenience sustain a seemingly never-ending roster of delivery options?

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