You fell for the boondoggle. Waymo has a very narrow set of routes you can take. They collect ultra HD maps for those routes in SF which has a completely unsustainable human labor cost. It doesn’t scale to “drive me on any road”. Waymo is localized-only driving funded at a major loss by a search ads monopoly.
Cruise does the same, just with VC money (and weird low-traffic hours of operation).
They have not solved driving in the generic sense and they are fooling you (and investors)
Three specific demographics prefer the (from the factory) higher ride height of SUVs:
1) Women
2) The elderly
3) The overweight
Women have a say in over 70% of vehicle purchases in the US. So even if the vehicle is for dad, mom (who is 5’4” on average) preferring the higher ride height of the SUV will influence the purchase if she has to drive it occasionally.
The elderly and the fat have a harder time getting in and out of lower-riding cars/hatches. The country is getting both older and fatter at the same time.
These are the driving forces in crossover dominance.
Their app is a thin wrapper to their mobile site. With Safari push notifications, they don’t need the App Store. I would guess the App Store isn’t a path of discoverability for them anyways. People find them very intentionally on the web.