It disgusts me how much duplicated effort there is with services like these. We can debate about the merits of market competition but what are they really competing over? The controlling factor is parking availability, there isn't really anything to innovate about paying for parking fees. The people who choose these apps aren't even really the ones that have to use them the most, because god knows the people that own the parking lot get free parking, and the "markets" for parking lots are not organized such that people who need to park can't really just decide not to park at a particular lot because they realize they use a shitty service to collect fees. This is a huge indicator that these services should be owned by municipal governments and cities should pool their resources on a standard shared platform / software suite instead of duplicating the effort making identical competitors.

Lots of industries like this, frankly. Another one that comes to mind is recruiting. Hundreds of thousands of duplicated man-hours, for what? Are any of them really better than the other? How do you "innovate" in these kinds of industries?