The popularity of on-demand food delivery apps is steadily on the rise. People who love to order sumptuous food from the comfort of their homes always find these apps irresistible. These apps completely brought a revolutionary paradigm shift to the modern lifestyle.
New business endeavors are constantly jumping on the bandwagon of India’s food app market, and the horizon for such apps is constantly expanding. Do you want to start a great food delivery business with a sophisticated app? Well, let’s assume you have given the proposition sufficient thought and considered all the twists and turns involved in a mobile app development project like this.
Now, do you want to figure out how much a food delivery app project costs? At least, do you want to know in detail all the key cost components and app features? Well, here we explain these things.
Type of Food Delivery Apps
Let’s discuss developing a food delivery app, and Firstly you have to follow below mentioned two major business models, such as the aggregator and delivery platform For logistics support. Let’s have a look at the basics of these two models.
- Aggregator
A food delivery app with this model works as a third-party platform where customers and restaurants meet. Through such an app, the customers can order food from their preferred restaurants, and the restaurants, on the other hand, can fulfill the order with their own delivery network. According to this model, the app company doesn’t provide any delivery support.
- Platform & Logistic Support
Apps running with this model actually offer both platform and logistics support to deliver foods to customers from their chosen restaurants and allow customers to track the delivery in real-time through the app.
Food Delivery App: Key Features
A food delivery app consists of 3 different panels such as restaurant panel, app rider panel and user panel. Let’s ha e a brief look at the key features of these 3 separate panels.
Restaurant Panel
- Dashboard: The restaurant owner, through their home page or dashboard, can monitor all orders, pending orders, and the orders on the way to delivery.
- Accept or Decline Orders: This feature allows the restaurant to accept or cancel an order depending upon availability.
- Manage Account: With this feature, restaurant owners can create their own account with restaurant logo, pictures, name, food images, operation hours, menus, minimum order quantity, etc.
- Payment: This feature integrates multiple payment gateways and payment solutions with the app to facilitate easy payment and shows comprehensive daily payment reports.
App-Rider Panel
- Order Request: As soon as a customer places an order, based upon rider location, the order will be assigned. The rider can accept or reject the order.
- Order Delivery: When the rider delivers an order, all details of the delivery can be tracked here.
- Order History/Logs: This feature allows the delivery person to check all orders that are completed.
- Call/Chat: The in-app call and chat feature will allow the rider to communicate with the customers waiting for delivery.
- Push Notifications: This will give an update to the delivery person regarding any changes or requests from the customer or the restaurant.
- Wallet/Get Paid Offline: This feature will help to disburse the payment to the riders on a weekly basis.
- GPS Tracking: Through this feature, the customer and the restaurant can keep tracking the delivery boy’s location in real-time.
- Transaction History: This feature will showcase all the transaction details in an orderly fashion to help to track past transactions.
- Online Support: This feature is to allow the delivery boy to seek instant online support at times of need.
- Google Map Navigation: Through this feature, the delivery boy will be able to locate the customer’s address on the map and can get navigation help to reach the address.
User Panel
- Login: Users can register and log in through this feature.
- Location: Users can set the location through a GPS map or by manually entering the address.
- Homepage: The homepage will showcase all the nearby restaurants, frequently ordered dishes and other key information and menu options.
- Menu: The menu will help customers navigate to different sections of the app.
- Payment: The feature will allow users to make payments against the orders by using cards, net banking, or mobile wallet.
- Offers and Discounts: This will update the users about the latest offers and discounts on food items from time to time.
- GPS Tracking: This feature will allow customers to track the exact delivery boy location in real-time.
- Search: By using this function, users can search for their preferred food items and restaurants.
Choose the Right Tech Stack
Based upon the above-mentioned features of the food delivery apps, the technology stack required by such app projects should include the following.
- FourSquare API and Grubhub API for listing restaurants online.
- Core Location Framework and Google Places API for iOS and Android for the location tracking feature.
- PayPal, e-wallets, Braintree, Stripe, and Square API for payment integration.
- Google Maps and MapKit for Google Map navigation
- AWS, Azure, and Google for cloud solutions.
- Facebook SDK Login and different social media SDKs for social registration.
- Amazon Cloud Storage for a storage solution.
- Google Analytics for analytics engine.
A Final Consideration Regarding Development Cost
Based on the features and functions you want to add to the on-demand food delivery app, you need to plan all your app developer resources and plan the development from the stage of the app idea to its launch.
No doubt, app development costs for such an app project largely vary depending on a number of factors. To keep the development cost low and within budget, it is always advisable to develop the app incrementally and embrace an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach. These things also help you to shape the app project through user validation.
Conclusion
Developing food delivery apps as a niche is extremely getting popular, and in the time to come, more apps are likely to appear breaking through this niche. To become successful, It’s Important to follow the industry-acclaimed practices without undermining their creative scope.