Build, engage, and analyse with Twinr's no-code mobile app features.
Get customized mobile app solutions for every industry and platform.
Your knowledge hub for seamless mobile app creation and optimization!
Home » Blogs » 20 Key Aspects to Consider for Developing a Successful Food Delivery App
By Gaurav Parvadiya | Last Updated On March 21st, 2025
Life after the pandemic has seen a drastic change in the way we shop for things and order food. For businesses, the on-demand delivery business model gained a lot of popularity after 2020.
The food delivery businesses are on the rise as they are among the top on-demand business models. Following the epidemic, revenues in markets such as food delivery increased significantly. As a result, many people are attracted towards developing food delivery apps like Swiggy, Foodpanda, Takeout, Grubhub, Uber Eats, and Zomato.
These food delivery apps are user-friendly, trendy and impressive enough to see success in just a few months. So, if you are among those who are interested in food delivery mobile app development, this blog is for you.
We’ll discuss 20 things to consider for food delivery app development and how to develop your app with less complexity.
Global online food delivery services industry to reach $192.16 billion by 2025. This suggests enormous development potential for online food delivery businesses.
Food delivery app sales are expected to reach $165 billion by 2029. The food delivery app business has strong development potential in the next few years.
According to AltIndex.com, food delivery services have generated $1.02 trillion in sales in 2023, up 20% from 2022.
CAGR of 10.5% is expected for the food delivery business between 2021 and 2026. This consistent rise confirms the viability and appeal of food delivery mobile app development.
These data demonstrate the food delivery industry’s rapid growth and huge market potential. They advocate the food delivery app development as a smart and profitable investment with high market and growth forecasts.
Create New App →
Let’s explore the 20 factors that are responsible for influencing the long-term growth of your food delivery business. Consider these when you go for on-demand food delivery app development:
Remember that your business model is unique to your business. Before you start creating an app for on-demand food delivery app development, you should decide which model is ideal for your company.
There are generally two main types of company models:
Direct Restaurant-to-Customer: This concept creates a direct line of communication between eateries and patrons from the time an order is placed until it is delivered. Restaurants take care of the whole ordering procedure, from taking orders to promptly delivering hot meals to customer’s doorsteps. Customers place orders directly with restaurants.
Platform-to-Customer: In this arrangement, customers use a website like UberEats to place food orders. Customer support is handled by the platform, including delivery.
How many apps have you downloaded and deleted them because of poor design, odd interface, and slow performance?
The answer is probably many, whether or not you can recall.
Similarly, if your app doesn’t have an easy-to-use UI, customers should be prepared to remove it quickly. One of the most important factors is an interface that is easy to use.
Your users are drawn to calls to action that are obvious and straightforward.
Forbes studies show that a $1 investment in UX often delivers a $100 return. With a possible ROI of 9,900%, this astounding return highlights the significance of offering a simplified user experience with an easy-to-use yet intuitive application interface.
Conversely, a staggering 70% of users may stop making purchases using your app if it has a poor design, which leads to a bad user experience.
Four essential components of a well-designed UI/UX are addressed to entice customers to come back for more:
You will probably see a significant return on investment if your food delivery app for restaurants takes into account these essential elements and allows customers to navigate as easily as walking from room to room.
Any food delivery app is unworthy without a real-time order tracking function. This function allows consumers to know exactly when their food will arrive. To incorporate this functionality, you must include a GPS tracking system in your application.
This feature not only benefits customers, but it also assists your delivery staff in receiving exact and accurate directions so that they may get to their destination without delay.
Furthermore, this tool allows you to track all of your delivery staff in real-time, assisting them in avoiding routes with heavy traffic or accidents.
From order confirmations to updates on pickup and delivery, customers want assurance and confirmation about the purchases they have placed. Giving customers these updates gives them a sense of certainty and makes them feel valued.
Additionally, loyal app users value being informed about new products, specials, and deals. You may quickly grab their attention by providing them with push notifications about these improvements, which can grow your customer base and increase orders.
Drive customer engagement and loyalty through the use of push notifications for order confirmations, delivery updates, customized promotions, and other purposes.
In a digital world where hackers lurk like burglars, online payment security is crucial. Customers and businesses worry about sharing credit or debit card information.
To build trust in your app, employ strong payment security. Strong payment and security standards underpin customer-business confidence.
Prioritize these to improve app security:
Prioritizing these security measures strengthens payment and data security and builds customer trust and loyalty.
Customer happiness depends on payment security and a smooth checkout process. Would you want to enter your payment information on a website or app every time you buy? Most unlikely.
Having few payment alternatives can also dissuade customers. If your app lacks its preferred payment option, it may abandon the transaction, losing sales and consumers.
Your app should provide:
Offering many payment choices and safe payment processes improves user experience and customer retention.
Customers use multiple platforms to access the internet in the digital age. Multiple ordering methods beyond Android and iOS apps are needed to accommodate their various tastes and assure accessibility.
Make your app compatible with multiple channels, not only mobile platforms:
Offering multiple ordering channels expands your app’s reach and improves customer experience.
Budgeting is crucial when developing an on-demand food delivery app. The size of your project depends on your budget. Define your financial parameters first.
On-demand food delivery app development costs depend on platforms, region, technological stack, features, and more.
Location affects developer hourly rates. Western European, Australian, and North American developers charge $50–100 per hour, while Asian and African developers charge $10–50.
Research shows that on-demand food delivery app development takes 500–850 hours. At $40 per developer hour, the cost would be $20,000 to $34,000.
You can also use an app maker to develop the best app for food delivery if cost is the biggest concern in your business.
Regardless of whether your goal is to create the best app for food delivery similar to UberEats or Zomato, you need to select an appropriate framework for your application depending on your needs and business plan.
Those that are most widely used include:
Make a decision depending on the tastes of your client. Android is used by a larger user base than iOS. For the web, Windows is typically preferable. The most popular OS with the fewest users is Harmony. Make a precise decision if you want to use native development.
You do have other choices, though like custom app development, and app builders to develop your food delivery apps. Select a technology that can be used to create apps for both Android and iOS.
You can get a cross-platform, cross-screen food delivery application ready with just one-time coding and a small investment of time and money.
The two key factors that define the success of your food delivery app are performance and scalability. The speed and effectiveness with which your app processes tasks and data is referred to as performance.
Scalability is the capacity to modify your app to accommodate expansion and higher demand. Your app can provide a smooth user experience that will entice users to return time and time again if it is optimized for performance and scalability. They might also promote your app verbally.
Your restaurant’s food delivery app must comply with a number of important legal and regulatory requirements in order to be considered legitimate. Should you fail to ensure that your company is in compliance with these requirements, you may be subject to a number of serious consequences, including legal responsibilities, fines, and harm to your reputation.
If you release your app without conducting quality assurance and testing, you risk losing the trust of your users.
Therefore, never release an app without first testing and quality-checking it. The testing procedure includes evaluating the quality, usability, and functionality of your app as well as finding and resolving bugs.
Both manual and automatic methods are possible. Your food delivery management app will help you establish trust with your consumers, enhance their experience, and guarantee the success of your food delivery app when it has undergone thorough testing and quality assurance.
Every consumer is searching for alluring incentives and deals. Apps such as DoorDash and UberEats create exciting promotions for their users in an effort to draw in new users and keep hold of current ones.
Thus, be sure to request this special functionality from your developers when you are developing a food delivery app for your brand. You may use it to effortlessly promote offers to customers and modify them to suit your needs.
UberEats, DoorDash, and other prominent firms base business decisions on user behavior. They know their customers, what they’re doing, how often they order, their favorite food, and more.
All this information comes from the “Analytic feature”. Their data is organized, analyzed, and used to make informed judgments. This makes them customer favorites. Which leads to huge revenues.
When creating a food delivery app, make sure it features “Analytics.” This helps you accomplish what popular brands do. Customers will also be familiar with you. Will be able to make results-driven judgments.
Your app must stand out in today’s competitive market and this can be done by creating a compelling USP for your app to grab their attention and engage them.
Your USP is your app’s “why” and distinguishes it from online and offline competition. Your app needs one or two unique features that appeal to your target audience to succeed in the digital age.
Highlighting your app’s merits helps attract and retain customers, helping you succeed in the competitive industry.
To stay competitive, you need more than a mobile app. The Internet is everywhere, and customers use laptops and desktops.
To attract customers utilizing huge screens, your website must reflect your brand’s identity and meet their needs. Users should be able to visit your website on any device. Since many of your visitors will use smartphones, make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
A unique, niche-focused, and user-friendly food enthusiast website will help you attract and retain customers, expanding your reach and succeeding in the competitive online market.
Tell your local customers about your online presence. Make your name known locally. Your local customers’ input might help you improve your internet presence.
Develop your local presence slowly, analyzing feedback and making modifications to improve client happiness. Before expanding beyond your neighborhood, aim for 80–90% positive feedback.
Use local praise to broaden your customer base. With a strong local base, you can confidently expand your business.
There are consumers everywhere. Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Bing, and additional social media platforms. Not everyone on the planet will be familiar with your company or app.
Your app should be designed such that Google or other search engines can display information about your business or app in response to a customer’s inquiry if they put in your name or any food item that is close to your business location.
Similarly, your application needs to facilitate the integration of your preferred social media platforms. With your app integrated with these channels, directing orders and increasing traffic will be a breeze.
This will support steady growth on your part. You will also have started down the path to become a household name ahead of your regional rivals.
Every food delivery app needs great customer service. Customer service is needed for anything from order questions to technical problems.
You can quickly resolve customer issues by giving live chat, email, and phone assistance. Clear communication, quick problem resolution, and tailored support can improve customer satisfaction.
Asking for and acting on customer feedback shows a dedication to service excellence and customer satisfaction. Effective customer service builds trust, loyalty, and food delivery app success.
A successful food delivery app must integrate third-party services. User experience and operations are improved by adding map navigation, payment methods, and restaurant menus from reputable third parties. Customers may easily track orders, make safe payments, and choose from many menu options. Integration with delivery services provides fast order fulfillment and delivery.
Third-party connectors streamline app development and save money. Prioritizing third-party service integration improves your food delivery app’s functionality and reliability, increasing customer pleasure and success.
To create a successful app delivery mobile app that ensures success, follow these essential steps:
Understanding the market will help to know customer’s wants and future expectations. Do a detailed research on eating habits, [references of customers, local food trends & problems of food delivery services. This will help you know the customers and target audience more clearly and draft solutions that cater their needs, not what you think might work.
Do competitors analysis by firstly understanding who our competitors are on both a large and small scale.
The business model you choose will impact your profitability and source of earning in future. It is essential to understand different models like:
Commission based which includes getting paid in percentage of orders by restaurants
Self-owned food delivery app which allows businesses to deliver the orders directly from their restaurant/cafe.
Your food delivery mobile app must have enough features that allow users to choose your app over that of your competitors every time they want to order food online. This includes easy navigation, interactive UI/UX to explore and browse options, real-time food delivery tracking, chat support, and more.
The app should also consider features for delivery partners such as accepting orders easily, contacting the customers without impacting confidentiality of customers and company support also.
The tech stack you select has a direct effect on app performance, security, and scalability. A strong backend ensures uninterrupted data flow, and an adaptable frontend ensures a user-friendly experience. There are majorly 2 best online food delivery app development options; traditional app development and the no-code food delivery app development. Choose between these two options considering app features, development cost, development time, efforts and future scalability.
The traditional app development includes building the project by writing codes manually while the no-code platforms have become a huge innovation, providing quicker and on-budget solutions with scalable technology. Non-code enables businesses to cope with food delivery apps without hiring technology professionals and work with drag-and-drop interfaces and pre-written components.
Both options have their pros and cons, it is essential to compare and choose according to your business goals.
The user interface (UI) offers an easy and frictionless way to move around and order products. Inventing a clutter-free interface, quick-loading pages, and easy checkout process are the musts of a good UI/UX. Having development processes to be agile is a procedure that allows changes to be made by the users as they give their feedback. The regular testing conducted provides assurance regarding the absence of bugs in the system.
Prior to the launch, every application has to undergo rigorous testing to find and fix bugs. No business wants to launch an app that creates navigation issues, irritates customers and shows zero detail to customers while looking to order food urgently. Thus, to ensure the app performs well and does not create any trouble in terms of usage and data protection, consider testing.
Promotion is a fundamental key point to app visibility and high user bases. Both digital marketing and social media, as well as digital influencers, can get to the bigger target group. Scaling needs are met through the constant improvement of the features of an application, geographic growth, moreover, the partnerships with the food providers help to increase the quantity of orders.
The success of food delivery is not only delivering the meal but also providing convenience, speed, and personalization. On the customer side, it means not only quick and easy ordering, but also some features that add to their satisfaction and loyalty.
Customized food recommendations which are based on the previous orders, the dietary preferences, and the current location of the customer significantly increase the purchasing potential of a customer. Thanks to the AI-powered recommendations, the guest-friendly interface gets highly user-engaging, the order becomes more expensive, and the user’s journey is more cohesive and intuitive.
On the customer’s side, the delivery ought to be on time with a very accurate tracking system based on that. The real-time GPS updates can give a sense of transparency to customers, lower the level of anxiety, and increase trust and, in the meantime, by using the best delivery routes we can ensure the fastest and most efficient service.
The ordering process will be more seamless and this is possible with a user-friendly interface. The app should allow users to save their preferences for the future, pay online using multiple payment gateways, even COD option. All these are basic features that MUST be there in a food delivery app and accessible seamlessly.
The ideology of loyalty among customers is improved by the benefits like discount coupons, exclusivity, and cashback rewards. The application is very interactive and keeps the user engaged, whether it be through the use of push notifications, gamified rewards, or referral bonuses that are being introduced to take care of a client in the long run.
Building a delivery app doesn’t require significant coding. Twinr’s user-friendly platform simplifies delivery app development from concept to launch. Twinr helps business owners of all levels establish a standout delivery app without technical experience.
Market Research
Invest some time in market research to find your target audience, location to target and expectations of your target audience. This will help you plan your app features and design accordingly.
Conception and Planning
Determine your app’s USP, then plan its features, functionality, and user experience. This approach might include real-time tracking, secure payment alternatives, and an accessible user interface.
Choice of Platform
Select the appropriate approach for your goals and problems while building iOS and Android independently or cross-platform to reach more people. Each has pros and cons; finding the right app and web development strategy is crucial.
Development Method
Choose a development method that suits your budget and app requirements. For small businesses or those who want quick development, they can go for no-code mobile app builders like Twinr to build the food delivery app. This provides huge possibilities of customization, user-friendly interface, and quick development as all you need is to enter your website URL and convert website into an app by adding necessary features and functionalities.
Design and UI
Create a compelling user interface with easy navigation, clear call-to-action buttons, and an appealing design. The success of an app depends on keeping users happy throughout their experience.
Onboarding
Encourage restaurants to sign up for your platform by offering them order management capabilities, pricing options, and seamless menu integration. A satisfying mobile app onboarding process attracts more restaurant partners.
Payment Integration
Collaborate with safe payment gateways to offer consumers smooth and secure payment options, including digital wallets, credit/debit cards, and cash on delivery. Combine these non-traditional forms with the ones that are conventional.
Quality Control and Testing
For a flawless user experience and the highest retention rates, utilize thorough testing across platforms and devices to find problems or malfunctions as soon as they arise in the app.
Launch and Marketing
Arrange a well-thought-out app launch that is backed with calculated marketing campaigns aimed at your target audience. Collaborate closely with eateries to advertise and motivate people to utilize it often.
The cost of developing a food delivery app depends on various factors like the number of features, the platform (iOS, Android, or both), and whether you choose custom development or a no-code solution. On average, it can range anywhere from $10,000 to over $100,000.
A great food delivery app must include features like real-time tracking, secure payment gateways, push notifications, an intuitive user interface, and AI-powered recommendations for a seamless experience.
The timeline varies based on complexity. A basic MVP can take 3-6 months, while a feature-rich app might require 9-12 months for full development.
Most apps use commission-based models (charging restaurants a percentage of orders), delivery fees, advertisements, and subscription plans (such as Uber Eats Pass).
It depends on your goals. If you own a restaurant, a Restaurant-to-Customer (R2C) model may work best. If you want to create a marketplace, a Platform-to-Customer (P2C) model, like Uber Eats or DoorDash, is more suitable.
With food delivery apps, ordering platters online is simple and quick—just tap or click to have them delivered right to your door. The mobile food delivery app industry will continue to operate in the market indefinitely. Consider your app’s UI, navigations, customer support system, payment integration, etc to ensure the success of your app.
It’s essential to choose the right mobile app development method because everything from design to marketing is highly affected by the development phase. Thus, for new startups or those who do not want to invest highly in app development, can choose Twinr’s website to app converter to get their app developed.
Start building your app with Twinr today and revolutionize your food delivery business!
Gaurav is the founder and CEO of Twinr, a tech entrepreneur with a decade of experience and a passion for SaaS. With a Master's degree in Computer Science, he specializes in no-code development, driving innovation in the mobile app industry. When he's not busy growing the company, you'll find him writing about tech, growth, software development, e-commerce, and occasionally sneaking in a game of badminton.