Building a Mobile App for Your Restaurant

Smartphone apps have become quite popular these days, and as restaurant owners we should take advantage of every opportunity that technology offers.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that we need to research every detail of a technology to know how to use it most effectively, and thus avoid making mistakes.

When it comes to smartphone apps, I want to tell you that we already have experience launching our own apps for some of our restaurants, and I want you to know that things did not turn out as we expected.

We learned that apps are only ideal if you have a huge restaurant; they probably work wonders for places like Pizza Hut or Burger King.

We launched “official” apps for iPhone and also for Android for three of our restaurants.

People could see our menu, place orders from the app, and get news from our restaurants.

Pretty handy, right?

Even so, the results were not what we expected, and that is why I do not recommend building your own mobile app for a restaurant. Instead, I recommend other alternatives that let you use mobile technology while avoiding all the drawbacks of building your own app.

Below I share all the details on the topic, in summary form:

Building a Mobile App for a Restaurant

1 – Developing a single app is expensive in itself. Do not expect to spend little; if you really want something professional, you will actually have to pay a good amount of money to the agency or specialist who builds it for you.

2 – The number of users who install it is usually quite low. When the app is launched and you advertise it, the number of installs is quite large; then, over time, the number of installs drops dramatically, and that is when you start feeling bad about the money you invested.

Take your phone and answer the following question for yourself: how many apps from small or mid-sized restaurants do you have installed on your phone? Probably none or a couple, but not the ones from every restaurant you usually visit.

The problem of a low number of app installs is serious, but the next point is even more serious.

3 – Thousands of installs, but little use. Installing an app is one thing, and using it is another. I myself have several apps on my phone that I have not opened in months. This is the most disappointing problem: the vast majority of people who install your own restaurant app usually use it a couple of times, and then only a tiny percentage keep using it.

4 – It is hard to recover the investment. After investing money in building the apps, you may even have planned the ROI, but as the months go by you realize it will be quite complicated and slow. In my case, I did not even open the document with my projection again.

5 – There are additional expenses. The advertising you will need to get the word out has a cost, as you know perfectly well. In our case, that money could have been used to attract more customers directly.

So what is the best way to take advantage of mobile phones?

Today, after having thrown money down the drain developing mobile apps for our restaurants, I can tell you from experience that the two most viable alternatives are the following:

1 – Third-party apps.

Having your restaurant appear in apps from companies that offer “travel guides” or “restaurant guides” is cheaper and much more beneficial than building your own app.

These types of apps usually have many installs and a lot of use precisely because they do not only offer the dishes of a single restaurant, and the companies that build them usually have a fixed advertising budget to promote their app and grow their community.

2 – Responsive web design for restaurants.

Responsive web design consists of creating websites that adapt to the screen size of the different devices users connect from. Computers, tablets, phones, etc.

It is a single effort. At the same time, you create a functional app that will be accessible from mobile phones and tablets, and you also create a brand-new website.

The fundamental difference is that, to use it from a cell phone, your visitors do so through the browser. That said, you can also make it easy for your customers to create an icon on their phone so it can be accessed like an app.

We will talk about this topic in more detail in another article, since it is a fairly broad subject.

In conclusion, I want you to know that we use both alternatives, third-party apps and responsive websites, and we have clearly benefited from them.

I recommend it: it is cheaper and more profitable.