The current circumstances of some countries have become severe due to the pandemic COVID 19. Most of the businesses and industries have been affected badly and require years to sustain damages. But out of all of them, the food delivery business is still surviving, in fact thriving.
People left at home, starving to eat tasty food, turned to food delivery apps, only food industry business allowed to run operations. And it resulted in the massive success of the on-demand food delivery app development, as the demand kept surging to new heights.
And in this article, we’ll explore all the questions that will help your build a successive food delivery app for your business venture.
Is it Worth Investing in the Food Delivery Business?
The billion-dollar business frenzy started when pizza hut introduced home delivery back in 1994. Since then, thousands of food delivery businesses have joined the race.
The successive years of the food delivery business led to them achieving revenue of $11 billion in 2021, with a projected annual growth rate of 7.94%. And it is expected to reach $14 billion by 2024.
The food delivery apps are also expected to gain 270 million users by 2024, leaving no doubt about their high potential to become a highly profitable business.
Which are the best Food delivery apps?
The best food delivery apps are the epitome of innovative and interactive app building. The food delivery app development has created intuitive and fast-performing apps. They improve sales with reliable food delivery infrastructure solutions and affordable commission rates from restaurants.
The best food delivery apps are:
- Uber Eats
- Zomato
- Grub Hub
- Deliveroo
- Swiggy
What are the Advantages of Food Delivery Apps?
Food delivery apps are increasingly considered the first option to order food. The variety and range of dishes and eateries attract customers effortlessly. And there are multiple advantages of food delivery apps, from customizing food orders to choosing preferred restaurants.
Let’s take a quick look at all the benefits of food delivery apps:
- Food delivery apps provide an easy-to-use and fast user interface to place orders quickly.
- Social media integration to help users sigh-up without going through much hassle.
- The accessibility in locating and ordering food from nearby locations.
- Multiple payment systems for smoothly processing payments.
- The food delivery apps provide access to track order status, courier location, and estimated delivery time.
- A favorite menu icon for you to save all your preferred eating destinations and dishes.
- The food delivery apps also develop a robust support system to resolve food orders and menu concerns.
How Does a Food Delivery App work?
Simply put, there are three layers of food delivery app; user-side, client-side (Restaurants or Admin), and delivery.
The user accesses all the available information regarding restaurants, menus, and order delivery in the first layer.
When an order gets placed from the user-side, it lands upon the client-side or restaurants to acknowledge and prepare the order.
The prepared order is picked up by the delivery and reached the front door of the user. Meanwhile, the user can track the order from being prepared to delivery.
Below are the functions of the layers as mentioned above of the food delivery app:
Customers
- Create an order
- Choose a restaurant
- Select their favorite foods
- Payment
- Rate the service
Admin
- Track customers’ activities
- Track delivery drivers’ status
- Manage payments
- Assign orders to delivery drivers
- Ask for feedback
- Rate driver’s performance
- Add new places to eat
Delivery drivers
- Accept order
- Locate customer address
- Contact customer
- deliver order effectively
- Accept payment
- Ask for feedback
- Rate customers
How to Develop a Food Delivery App?
The on-demand food delivery app development requires extensive knowledge of mobile app technology and functionality. There are several different approaches to develop fully-fledged mobile apps.
But first, you need a strategic plan before embarking on food delivery app development, and the outline helps you recognize all the objectives required to be full-filled. And the result comes out to be operational and responsive.
Let’s look at the summary of a step-by-step guide to learn more about on-demand mobile app development:
Step1: Engineer a business plan with relevant objectives and strategy
The first thing you need is asking questions a lot of questions; Who will be using the food delivery app? What will be the primary focus of the app? Who will develop the app, and how?
These questions will give you a fragmented knowledge for making an effective strategy. The plan should consider all the essentials for food delivery app development, from the development platform to the cost of the entire development process.
Step2: Utilize and Integrate development platforms
The development strategy includes choosing a compelling development platform for your food delivery app. It means what type of users will access your app, as developers can build the app to serve different platforms like android and iOS. You can also go for the cross-app development platform to provide the functionality for both app platforms.
Step3: Choose easy-to-use and effective features
The features of an app provide users with different functionalities to access the core responsibilities of the app. Features help food delivery apps perform tasks effortlessly.
Let’s get a summary of all the essential features needed to run food delivery apps:
Login: An essential feature that comes with the integration of social media for ease of registration.
Search: It allows users to search for different dishes, food, and places. There are many filters and sorting techniques that help you find the best-preferred services. In search, you see all the images of the dish, process, and description.
Order placing: Once finding your favorite dish, this feature allows you to add it to your cart with your other charges.
Order checkout: includes all selected dishes and the order total.
Payment: The in-built payment system allows users to effectively and efficiently pay for their orders. Several payment gateways come equipped with mobile apps such as PayPal, MangoPay, Stripe, and many more.
Notifications: It helps in reminding users about their order and delivery status. It also displays many new and exciting deals of the day.
Order tracking: The food delivery app utilizes Google Location API for Android apps and CoreLocation framework for iOS apps to show real-time order tracking from the mobile app. Map kits and Google Maps assist the delivery driver in finding the best and fastest route.
Step4: Optimize responsive technology stack
The technology stack is the most vital element of the food delivery app development. It helps in optimizing the performance and responsiveness of the mobile app for providing users a seamless experience.
Let’s get a quick look at the technology stack required for food delivery apps:
For listing Restaurants
Payment Gateway Systems
Square API
PayPal
Braintree
Stripe
Locating User and Restaurant Location
Google Places API
Core Location Framework
Google Maps
Push notifications
Firebase Cloud Messaging
Amazon SNS
Urban Airship
Step5: Focus on UI and Design
The user interface and design are the most influential element of the food delivery app. An easy-to-use interface does not attract customers but makes them stay longer.
The design of the food delivery is of as much importance, creating an attractive and interactive eco-system for users to find and place orders effortlessly.
Step6: Hire a Food Delivery App Development Company
As I have mentioned before, there are several approaches to on-demand food delivery app development. You can utilize many latest platforms with advanced plugins that require no additional or non-technical expertise.
Or you can hire a mobile app development company to help you create a professional and fast-performing food delivery app. They allow you to create a food delivery app from scratch relevant to your development strategy for maximizing results.
Step7: Create an MVP and test for debugging
After hiring a mobile app development company, you need to consider all the basic functionalities and features to create a minimum viable product (MVP). It helps you to analyze operability and assists you in finding all the possible bugs or complications.
The main task then reaming is to remove and fix all the bugs and develop the app’s market version.
What is the cost of Food Delivery App Development?
The cost of on-demand food delivery app development is subject to all the features, technology, size, and type of the app with the additional cost of mobile app development.
All the features, technologies, and tools need to be recognized first to estimate the cost for food delivery app development.
