It helps restaurant owners to optimize, integrate, and streamline their entire business process and build a huge customer base.

There has been a steep rise in online restaurant value chains across the globe where people love to order their favorite food and get an instant doorstep delivery. Especially, during the pandemic times, restaurants across the globe came up with this innovative concept driving quick responders to this transformation. The advent of technological innovations in restaurant industry has surely paved way for augmented growth of interactive software that has added to the convenience and flexibility to food online. Becoming a part of this flourishing industry will offer you seamless opportunities to globalize your restaurant app and generate huge revenues from it. The demand for restaurant app development will continue to rise in the coming time as people find a flexible option to order to their favorite food from their favorite restaurants that best suits their hectic schedules. In this blog, we have discussed the entire process in detail that will offer much valuable insights into restaurant app development.

How Does a Restaurant App Work?

Besides your own restaurant, you can develop a network with some other restaurants that exist in your city. You also must have a delivery system that you can easily consider by hiring any courier service on a fixed percentage. Now, when a user registers for your app and places an order for a specific restaurant, the app notifies the restaurant to prepare the dish. Meanwhile, the user is also notified by the app that his order is under process. The delivery boy nearby that particular restaurant is notified to collect that order and deliver on the mentioned address. You can add a delivery fee for an order that will go to the delivery boy and you will charge a fixed commission on each order that a restaurant receives through your app.

Must-have Features for Food Delivery App

You must plan well before deciding for the features that your restaurant app will offer to users. It is the features that made apps like UberEats, GrubHub, and StarBucks so popular. The level of interaction, flexibility, and convenience that your restaurant app offers to users to users will depend much on the features only. We have pooled up some user-centric features from different restaurant apps across the globe that you can consider from your restaurant app development.

User Panel Features

• Social Login
• Search Restaurants
• Search Menu
• In-app Chat
• Push Notifications
• Add to Cart
• Payment Integration
• Order Tracking
• Ratings & Reviews

Restaurant Panel Features

• Login
• Dashboard
• Menu Management
• Push Notifications
• Payment Management
• Add/Edit/Block
• Order History

Delivery Panel Features

• Login
• Accept/Reject Order Request
• Order History
• In-app Chat
• GPS-assisted Route Navigation
• Online Support

Ask your food delivery app development company to incorporate all these essential features in your restaurant app to make it best convenient for users, restaurants, and delivery persons. You can add some more exciting features based on your initial research that best caters to food ordering requirements of your target audience.

Restaurant Mobile App Development Cost

Before calculating an average development cost of a food & restaurant app development project, you need to focus on multiple factors.

• Type of App development company
• Total number of Features
• Type of App (native, web-based or cross-platform)
• App Design
• Use of Advanced technologies

These are some basic aspects that will add significantly to the total development cost of your restaurant app development. There are different per hour app development rates prevalent in different countries. So, the geographical location and the expertise of an app development company will certainly add to cost. Moreover, native app development requires hiring two different teams (for Android and iOS platforms). Cross-platform and web-based apps can perform on multiple platforms. App designing also requires much effort and time to be invested in the project that will affect the cost and using some advanced technologies like AI, ML, AR/VR integration will also require some investment in integrating them in your restaurant mobile app development.

Taking an average per hour development rate of $ 70, we have evaluated the entire restaurant app development process for different apps and have found that a swift and scalable restaurant app can easily be developed within USD 40000. This estimate is for developing an app from scratch for a single platform (iOS or Android). However, choosing to launch a web-based app will also cost the same and will perform on multiple platforms.

Other Crucial Factors to Consider

Market Research: You must conduct extensive market research on restaurant apps that are already prevalent in your region. Moreover, the type of audience that you are going to target must also be take into account. Look for their features and functionalities and try to add some customized features based on your research.

Choosing the Best Development Agency: You must also research on some top-rated restaurant app development companies and look for their profiles and clients’ reviews. For more authentic information, you can consider visiting some rating agencies like Clutch, Software Suggest and G2 Firms. These sites will offer detailed information on the development aspect of a mobile app development company.

Partnering with Restaurants: There may be many restaurants that may be struggling to get enough attention by people. Not only the struggling ones, but you have to partner with some renowned restaurants which should agree to render their food services for your app depending on the incentives that you offer to them.

Diversified Menu: You must assure that you have partnered with different types of restaurants that offer different food categories or are famous for a particular dish. The idea is to cover maximum food items that your users can explore through your app.

Develop a Pre-launch Marketing Strategy: There are millions of mobile apps available on the app stores to be downloaded. To make sure that your restaurant app gets instant attention by users, you must ensure its marketing strategy to help it appear on the top of search results.

End Note

Adopt a professional approach and prepare a detailed project requirement list that will help your development agency to deliver exactly what you have expected out of it. Focus on providing a smooth navigation with attractive app designs that will help your restaurant app to gain maximum downloads in short time span.