Things to Consider While Going for On-Demand Food Delivery App Development

Food app development is a hot trend for food businesses and upcoming food delivery startups. And why not, food apps provide a door-step delivery for your favourite cuisines within minutes of your order. If you are planning to supplement your brick-and-mortar food store with an On-Demand Food Delivery App Development solution, then you must know a few things.

Ideally, a food app owner must have a unique app idea that ensures the app will be differentiated by customers. Moreover, you should be able to have a reliable Food Delivery App Development Company alongside that is well equipped and has incorporated similar technologies, frameworks and projects.

Following are some crucial considerations for food businesses before they get started:

1. Food App Model, App Idea and Target Audience

The very first step to build a food application is to identify the target audience. Ideally the working class, entrepreneurs and students love to order online due to the convenience of home delivery services and of course a variety of cuisines and restaurants to choose from. However, there are two main questions here to ask yourself:

a)    Will it be an app that will have a franchise or will it be an app to connect nearby restaurants?

b)    And who will manage logistics/order delivery, the food business or will you hire a logistics company for the same.

Once you are sorted with the food application idea and its model and have identified the target audience, it is time to pay extra attention to the popular competitors in your region and analyse their features and available data on the web to know further insights.

2.  Understand the Technical Aspects

Developing a food application will require you to hire a Food Delivery App Development Company. However, you must understand the technical aspects of development more clearly to have a deep insight into the development process.

Understand that the technologies you choose will affect the budget, outcomes and a lot more. For instance, selecting both iOS and Android for native development will be a bit costly but will boost user experience. While if you go for a budget-friendly development then you may have to compromise with the user experience a bit. However, you would have access to third-party tools and APIs which will enable the development team to customize more.

Some tools an On-Demand Food Delivery App Development partner employs:

●     Braintree and PayPal, Net banking, Stripe, eWallets for payment

●     Cloud environment can be AWS, Google, Azure or others

●     Android (Kotlin or Java) and iOS (Swift) as programming languages

●     React Native, Angular, Ionic or other cross-platform frameworks if required

●     GPS tracking will need Core location framework for iOS and Google Location API for Android

●     MapKit for Apple and Google Maps API for Android.

●     For restaurant listing one may use Foursquare API.

And so on. Consider partnering up with a reliable development partner who has sufficient experience in app development.

3.  Important Functionalities and UI Considerations

The functionalities you have in the application impacts the user experience which is very important when you are planning to start an online business. Easy navigation and the use of right features, colours and images make a food app stand out. Below are some of the important features to have in a food application:

a)    List restaurants as per locations, cuisines, and type of food.

b)    Add a filter option for user convenience

c)    Allow single-click assign-social login and one-click food order

d)    Add geolocation feature which is undoubtedly the most important functionality to have.

e)    Add a built-in tracker to keep track of order status along with Google maps integration

f)     Allow multiple payment gateway integrations with various mode payments.

g)    Add SMS and in-app notification at every stage of food ordering

h)    Add a review and rating option for both delivery personnel and customers.

Some important functionalities to add include Chatbot Integration, Dynamic Cart Development, and AI-powered algorithms for smart recommendations and cart closures. Also, check if your Food Delivery App Development Company expertise in AI and ML technologies before going ahead.

4.  Cost of Food Delivery App Development

The development cost depends on a lot of factors including platforms, features, developer cost per hour, and more. The developer cost is calculated on a per hour basis.

Usually, it is $20- $100 per hour (India), $50 to $250 per hour (US), $30 to $150 per hour (EU) for different parts of the world. Businesses can put a final quote of from $5,000 to $12,000 considering the experience variation of developers. Also, considering the extra costs on UI, Testing and Licensing consider adding another $2,000-$3,000 to the overall cost.

Bottomline 

For On-Demand Food Delivery App Development, food businesses should do their research, identify important features, use modern functionalities like chatbot and AI tools, third-party integrations, and keep budget constraints in mind. With these considerations backed by a suitable app idea, food businesses can surely build a desirable application.