Make Your Own Restaurant App Without Coding
Millennials spend 44% of their money on restaurants, while 25% of all the iPhone users have at least one restaurant app installed on their phone. In the world of push notifications, one-tap payments and one click away pizza, massive opportunities lie ahead for smart restaurant owners. Any successful restaurant offering food delivery could boost its sales tremendously by providing their hungry customers with a native mobile app.
It’s 2018 and making a beautiful restaurant app for iOS and Android has never been easier. In addition to a wide variety of features available (food delivery tracking, Apple Pay & Android Pay, high-quality photos & videos, geofencing, location detecting, smart notifications, etc), there are also a ton of ways to approach the development process for creating your own restaurant app. Let’s lay out the steps of launching a successful restaurant app, at an incredibly affordable price.
1. Download an existing restaurant app template with backend
There are plenty of options in the wild. App templates are fully-coded apps that already contain all the functionalities you need for a restaurant app. By using an app template, you save a crazy amount of effort, by skipping long and costly iterations, such as designing & developing the app. You don’t need to hire a developer nor a designer, so you end up saving thousands of dollars.
Check out markets such as Instamobile or Restaurant App Templates, which offer fully implemented app templates, ready to be published to app stores.
In terms of what programming language should you be looking for, there are really just three options:
- Swift — Apps written in Swift are meant to be published to App Store, so only your iOS customers will be able to download it.
- Kotlin — Kotlin apps are running on Android devices only.
- React Native — Apps made with React Native are compatible with both iOS and Android, but they come with small disadvantages — they tend to be slightly slower and can’t replicate the amazing animations iOS app supports.
If you buy an app template, make sure it has backend integration too. That is the server where all the restaurant data & orders are being stored. You should prefer templates integrated with Firebase or Parse, which are free and simple to use. Make sure you check out all the template’s details before your purchase.
2. Customize the downloaded restaurant app
Now that you own the source code of a restaurant app, it’s time to personalize it. Change the app name to your restaurant, update the logo with your own, add/remove features you need/don’t need. Pick your favorite colors too! If you purchase a respectable template, you’ll be provided with detailed documentation on how to achieve all of these without coding. You usually only have to change a configuration file.
Before purchasing a restaurant app template, make sure the seller provides you with a comprehensive documentation — ideally, this should be public already, so that you can get an idea of how much effort you’ll have to invest on personalizing the app.
3. Add all your restaurant data into the app
Since you’ve purchased an app template that has backend integration, you’ll most likely have a tutorial on how to add your data to the backend database. This usually requires you to fill out forms with your food items and it shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes.
The data consists of all the food categories you’d like your restaurant app to contain, as well as all the food items (with photos too). Additionally, some templates support more advanced information, such as the restaurant’s address, reservation details, contact number, etc. Make sure you find all these details in the aforementioned seller’s documentation.
4. Publish the app to App Store / Google Play
Now that the entire app making process has finished, it’s finally time to pull the trigger and release the app to your hungry customers.
There are a few important things to consider upfront, regarding publishing an app to the app stores. App Store and Google Play are slightly different in terms of how they function and how their app submission process looks like.
App Store Submission
Submitting an app to Apple requires an Apple’s developer license. This costs $99 per year and it’s the only way to keep your app on their store. Apple also requires you to submit your own app, so having someone else (with a developer account) submitting the app on your behalf is usually a great area and you’d risk your app to be rejected.
Additionally, please make sure you follow Apple’s guidelines when it comes to the app submission. They have a very strict policy around screenshots, descriptions, etc. Also, make sure you give them a test user account to be able to test the app. All the submitted apps are being manually tested by an Apple tester.
Beware of the fact that Apple’s review process usually takes at least a couple of days and it’s very common that the first app submission will be rejected, given their high bar. Fortunately, they always provide a clear reason, which you can address and resubmit the app for as many times as you want.
Google Play Store Submission
Submitting an Android app to Google Play is much cheaper — you only need to pay $25 upfront, for a developer account and then you can submit as many apps as you want forever.
Google is also less restrictive when it comes to general app conventions and their review process is not manual, which basically means your app gets released to production almost instantly.
In conclusion, making a restaurant app for mobile devices is extremely easy, due to a wide variety of fully coded restaurant app templates that come at a relatively cheap price. By taking advantage of an existing template, you save a lot of time & money and you don’t have to worry about what features & design you need. By creating a minimum viable product for your restaurant quickly and efficiently, you get to test your mobile market as soon as possible and learn about what business decisions you should make to help your business thrive in the Internet space.
