It's their attempt at keeping up with Starbucks, who locked in the app game years ago. A better question is why would anyone go to Tim Hortons in the first place
Because it's ubiquitous and highly consistent, they have decent food and tea/coffee, it's relatively cheap and very fast, it's a great place to meet friends or work from home (away from home), and most of them are open until midnight at least, if they're not 24 hours.
I was being a bit facetious, but it is really hard to work remotely from Tims, and it doesn't really function like a cafe in the community sense. 24 hours is nice, I'll grant them that, but they fight tooth and nail to not pay their workers even 10c more per hour and strive for cheapness above all else. There's a place for that, but if the only cafe within a 20 min walk is Tims, that place would suck to live, and that's pretty often the case.
> it doesn't really function like a cafe in the community sense.
Some do, and those are the ones I frequent. At mid-day and early afternoon it is often very busy with people that hang around for half an hour or more—not just to eat, but to socialize. The amount of first dates I've witnessed (universally older people, often divorced), mothers or fathers with babies or toddlers catching up with a friend, college-aged people having openly-public heated discussions about their sex lives, old biker dudes planning their next trip and going on the wildest tangents about mystery vacations picked by lottery, primary-aged boys arriving by bike to get an iced cappuccino and hang around talking, work colleagues planning a company outing and dissing their other colleagues, etc. is incredible. Dozens and dozens of interactions that I've observed. And I haven't even mentioned the staff yet: the ones nearby me are almost always jovial and are free to discuss things among themselves, plainly audible due to the open kitchen designs, and listening to them is oddly inviting. Also, most of them don't play music, or if they do it's pretty quiet and is not distracting.
