On-Demand food delivery app businesses are thriving even in this COVID-19 pandemic. Food lovers can now choose and order food of their preference on the GO. If your made is on leave, or you are planning a house party, these apps come handy and accessible. The market is hot for on-demand food delivery businesses, and returns are waiting for those ready to bank on the opportunity.

From giants like Amazon to small startups alike, have set strong foot on the market of direct-to-customer delivery apps in 2020. Smartphones have made it easy for businesses to increase their customer outreach.
A recent study shows a whopping 60% of US consumers order food online, at least once a week. Food delivery apps are people’s favourite apps. Hence businesses need to invest in making feature-rich and easy to navigate mobile apps.
Developing a powerful mobile app is not a cakewalk. You will need to consider multitudes of factors, like customer experience, tech stack, features, development costs, transactional security and maintenance costs before you have your app ready to use.
When you first start developing an app like Zomato, UberEats or GrubHub, begin with an MVP (minimum viable product). Your MVP will have three to five most important features. To design a new-age food delivery mobile app generally has three interfaces:

For Customer
For Owner/Admin
For the Delivery Agent

Let’s look into these three interfaces of food delivery apps and how they are useful in delivering the best experience and results.

The Customer
It allows food lovers to search for the preferred restaurant or the mouth-watering dish, place their food order, and make payment comfortably at the comfort of sitting at their home. You can go with the mobile-first approach for your first food delivery app. Now, add must-have features and keep it simple and customer-centric.

1. User login/Sign up
User login allows users to make their profile, save their contact information, order history, and delivery addresses. You can let users repeat their order from past at just one click if the info they need to provide is readily available. Allow users’ to sign up using through social media accounts. It is easy and saves them from passwords fatigue.
You additionally need to ensure to secure the customer credentials and personal details. Use an additional layer of security to safeguard the app user details and credentials.
2. Easy restaurant and food search facility
When it comes to food, who doesn’t love more options? Try to help your customers in finding the right meal, beverage, dessert and much more. Provide them with a transparent list of all the eateries and cuisines available. Allow filters based on the distance, delivery time, customer ratings, cuisines, and offers.
3. Cart feature
Hopping from one restaurant to another is not easy in real life. But when ordering from a food delivery app, you have that privilege. A food delivery app stands incomplete without its Add to Cart feature. Allow your customer to order more than one item from one or more than one restaurant. This super feature will allow them to place an order as they like in one go.
4. Food Tracking
Once the customer places the order, there is no compelling reason to make the wait time unbearable for valuable customers. In the wake of putting in an order and payment confirmation, your app must share the contact details of the delivery executive with the customer. It helps the customer to contact the delivery executive and get real-time information about where they are in case the GPS fails. Also, allow them to track the current status of their order progressively.
5. Secure and Easy Payments
You will need to integrate different payment receiving options for the simplicity of payment. Payment should be acceptable through net banking, credit card, debit card, UPI, or cash on delivery. Integrating numerous payment methods is going to make it simpler for the user to pay the bill against the purchased food. Make sure if customers decide to pay through online mode, their online payment credentials should be safe and secure. Any trade-off to this security concern can cause noteworthy harm, and consequently, your popularity can suffer.
6. Order History
The food order history is helpful for customers who consistently place similar orders. It helps them to make the same request again without searching a lot and ultimately save their valuable time.
7. Ratings, Complaints, and Feedbacks
Empower your users by giving them a listening ear. If your customers can rate, complain and share all their experiences- regarding food quality and delivering orders, they will trust you better.
Optional Features:
Other than the essential features listed above, you can likewise include some extra features of an online food delivery app that will make it more considerable for the users:-
Offers, promos and coupons
For any food delivery app, the features of offers, coupons, and promotion offer given to the customer, will be a delight. It will help you in building customer loyalty, retention, and referrals, drawing more users on your app.

The Administrative panel
The admin panel is for you, the app owner. The admin panel is fundamental as it holds the features to:
1. Accept orders
2. Order Management
3. Restaurant Listing
4. Dashboards about the user requests, deliveries, and payments
5. User Profiles
The Delivery Service
Your delivery service needs the third unique interface of an online food ordering app that is going to be utilised by the delivery executive for:
1. Assigning delivery service
2. Managing Orders
3. GPS Tracking
4. Delivery Status Update
5. Delivery History

Bottom Line
Developing a mobile app for online food ordering is an excellent choice to meet the current trends of the food business. The development cost and its development time depend mainly on what features you want to integrate into your food delivery app. If you are tight on budget, outsourcing your on-demand-food-delivery app requirements to an experienced mobile app development company can help you with the right go-to-market strategy and on-time app development as per your needs.