They beat everyone else, including UberEats, to the AU market. I think them and Foodora were the first two, but they won and UberEats just relied on their brand to muscle in. Both share the market pretty evenly ehre, from what I can tell.

I wonder if they did this for many 'secondary' markets to try to beat the big players or if AU is just a weird case.

In SA, I've really not had any luck with Deliveroo outside of the CBD - it only seems to work if you're right on top of the restaurants. UberEats seems a little better, but it still really restricts how far away from a restaurant you can be, I moved one suburb over (3km?) and lost access to about 10 restaurants that were in my old suburb.

I tend to prefer apps where the restaurants themselves look after the delivery, EatNow is a good example. They can charge a little more for delivery, and therefore seem to be willing to deliver further away. And presumably, it's probably a little fairer on the delivery guys as they got an actual job rather than just an app.

Only the inner suburb markets though. Once you're >10km out of the city center it's all Menulog and UberEats, with a smattering of people using EatNow.

In Reading where I used to live all they did was link me up with restaurants I actually want to eat at but can't because of kids or work or whatever instead of just disgusting quality pizza/curry/chinese/fried chicken joints

Nothing, they just managed to convince more investors to continue pouring tens and hundreds of millions in the hole of their losses, while others were rightfully let to die.