Iphone discrimination is the allegation of a billion-dollar lawsuit against food delivery app DoorDash.
Filed early this month in Maryland, a class-action lawsuit is accusing DoorDash of appling higher fees to iPhone users verses Android users with identical orders. According to the lawsuit, “expanded range” fees of up to $2 an order are applied excessively to iPhone users. Those fees are meant to apply when a restaurant and user are too far apart, but the lawsuit says that they’re applied to iPhone users more often than Android users.
The suit goes on to allege that DoorDash purposefully sends customers’ orders to restaurants located farther away, which may “trigger the expanded range fee, and justify increased delivery costs.”
The expanded range fee is listed on DoorDash’s customer support page, though its description is vague as a “fee [that] helps DoorDash preserve your access to the available merchants farthest from you.”
The suit has been highlighted on TikTok, with multiple influencers putting in simultaneous and identical orders from different phones and coming up with different totals, anecdotally proving the iPhone discrimination.
DoorDash, which boasts more than 27 million users, denied the allegations in the lawsuit.
“DoorDash does not charge more based on the type of phone you use — period,” a company spokesperson told The New York Post on Wednesday. “Any allegation that we deliberately charge iPhone and Android users differently or only charge DashPass (a discount service) members an expanded range fee is blatantly false,” the representative continued. “We categorically reject the untrue claims in the lawsuit and look forward to vigorously fighting them.”
DoorDash also discounts the accusation that restaurants are cherry-picked to increase long-distance fees as “patently false.”
According to the lawsuit, the cause behind the iPhone discrimination is tied to multiple studies indicating that iPhone users, on average, make more money than Android users.
Photo: Diego Thomazini/Shutterstock
