The Uber app keeps pushing notifications to advertise fast food. This is so annoying since you need alerts enabled for when your ride is on its way. As I am a very infrequent customer I just uninstall the app, and reinstall it if I need a ride.

This abuse of notifications (and the user) is quite prevalent, unfortunately.

In the case of the Uber app you should be able to turn these off (they are conveniently enabled by default, of course!).

On the iphone it's Setting -> Communication -> Marketing Preferences -> Push notifications.

You don’t actually need alerts enabled for your ride - I just get ready, order my ride, then have a seat in a chair where I can see the road and do some reading. When my ride shows up I leave the house.

So many freaking apps do this crap, Apple needs to implement a categorization system for notifications and allows users to choose which categories of notifications to allow. Anything other than essential notifications needs to go in the useless crap category.

I have a rule that if an app gives me a marketing push notification, they lose notification privileges.

This is why I use Lyft, and only install Uber when I'm traveling to a country where Lyft doesn't operate.