McDonald's patrons who travel to the fast food chain looking for one of their popular frosty desserts, can often be left disappointed to find the ice cream machine is not working.
Luckily, a new app is here to save the day for McFlurry fans, as it records the status of each frozen treat machine in every UK restaurant.
Established in 2020, the original McBroken is the creation of American software engineer Rashiq Zahid, who came up with the idea when he was unable to order a McSundae while on holiday in Berlin.
Zahid designed a bot that orders an ice cream from every McDonald's location in Germany, the USA, Canada and the UK once every 30 minutes. If the McFlurry is available, the restaurant gets a green dot; if not, it is highlighted in red, reports the Scottish Daily Express.
A similar app has now been created just for the UK which also tracks milkshakes. Mc-Broken attempts to order six different McFlurries and four different milkshakes twice a day.
If both are available, the restaurant is highlighted in green; if just one is on offer it turns yellow; and if both machines are out of action it is red.
Describing his idea to The Verge website, Zahid said: "I love poking around in different apps and just looking at the security features and the internal APIs. I am pretty familiar with how to reverse-engineer apps. I was like 'Okay, this should be pretty easy.'"
His app was a huge success, attracting 10,000 views in the first 20 minutes before eventually crashing as he was running it on a server that cost just $5 a month.
"I just made it for fun," said Zahid. "But people were like 'Wow, this is the best thing I've seen this entire week.'"
There was speculation that McDonald's would have it shut down but the fast food chain seems to be entirely behind the idea.
David Tovar, McDonald’s VP of US Communications, tweeted: "Only a true @McDonalds fan would go to these lengths to help customers get our delicious ice cream!"
The UK site was set up by Darren Swan, a web applications developer from Bournemouth. At the time of writing it shows that 72 per cent of McDonald's in and around Glasgow have both ice cream and milkshake machines working. Edinburgh, Fife and Dundee have 77 per cent in action.
Further north, 100 per cent of machines are working in Aberdeen and also in the Highlands (which is perhaps not surprising as there are only four outlets in Fort William, Inverness and Nairn).
Don't miss the latest news from around Scotland and beyond - Sign up to our daily newsletter here.
