Ordering from your phone without installing an app

Consider what you're asking of a hungry guest, sitting at your table, at lunchtime. Installing an app means: open an app store, sign in to an account, wait for a download on the restaurant's signal, grant permissions, create an account.

At every step, some guests stop. For someone visiting once, the app will never pay for itself — not for them, not for you. And meanwhile they're occupying a table that could already have ordered.

That's the underlying reason, not a technical preference: the browser is already there, already updated, already familiar.

No account to create, no password, no installation. The guest closes the page and nothing remains on their phone.

The code is specific to each table, and that's what replaces asking "which table are you at?".

• The code printed on the table contains a web address and nothing else — no data, no program.
• The phone's camera reads that address and offers to open it. On every recent phone this is built in: no scanner app to install.
• The browser opens your menu, current to the second, in the guest's language.
• The guest builds their order and sends it. It appears on the restaurant's side with the table number.

Three worries come up, and two of them are well founded.

"What about a guest with no smartphone, or who doesn't want to?" Well founded. Keep a few paper menus. A QR menu should never be the only way to order: it absorbs the majority, not everyone.

"What if there's no signal?" Also well founded. The guest uses their own data, but a basement room or a thick wall is enough to break it. Guest wifi solves this and justifies itself.

"Doesn't it make service less human?" Here experience says the opposite: what makes service less human is a waiter transcribing an order with his nose in a notepad, coming back to say a dish is finished, then getting a table wrong. When the transcription goes, the waiter becomes available again.

Those five points are exactly what guests cite when asked why they prefer it. Not one of them is technical.

• They browse at their own pace, without a waiter standing over them.
• They see current prices, never one crossed out or corrected in pen.
• They don't order a sold-out dish, because it's no longer shown.
• They read in their language, Arabic or French, switching with one tap.
• They see photos before choosing, which matters most on a long menu.

Ordering and paying are two separate things, and that matters in Algeria.

With Qweko, the guest orders from their phone and pays as usual: cash, at the counter or with the waiter. No online payment is required, no card is asked for, and the money passes through no platform — it goes straight into your till.

That's also what makes starting immediate: there's no banking paperwork to arrange before you can take orders.