How to Make a Food Delivery App: Easy-to-Follow Guide for 2025

A food delivery app is a digital solution that connects customers with local restaurants, streamlining the entire process of food ordering and delivery. Before diving into the technical considerations of how to create a food delivery app, let's explore the details of its business structure.

To launch a delivery app that succeeds, you need to build a digital ecosystem with functionality for each user role. Here are the main business roles that need separate solutions to create a food delivery app like Uber Eats:

This set of apps will cover all aspects of your food delivery business. Sounds a little confusing, right? Let’s dive into the process and take a closer look at each of their tasks.

Before we delve into the details of food delivery app development process, let's take a closer look at the business logic and working mechanism of such apps to understand their functionality better:

1. Getting started and ordering. Clients open the app, browse the available restaurants, and select one. They study the menu, select items, and order food.
2. Restaurant notification. The restaurant receives a notification once the customer confirms the order and makes payment through the app. Staff receive the order information through the app's proprietary interface connected to the food delivery platform.
3. Courier searching. The app notifies nearby couriers (delivery drivers) of available orders. The courier accepts the order and heads to the restaurant to pick up the prepared food.
4. Pickup and delivery. The courier uses the navigation system built into the app to find the fastest route to the customer's location. During the trip, the app tracks the courier's location in real-time and provides information to the customer and the restaurant.
5. Completing order and reviewing. Upon arrival at the customer's location, the courier completes the delivery by handing over the food. The customer acknowledges receipt and can leave feedback or rate the service directly through the app.

Throughout the process, the app handles payment transactions securely. It subtracts the order cost from the customer's saved payment method, deducts a fee, and transfers the balance to the restaurant and courier accounts. Platform administrators oversee the entire process, ensuring smooth operations. They manage user accounts, handle disputes, optimize the app, and analyze data to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Developing a food delivery app involves several stages and requires a clear understanding of the market, target audience, competitors, and business model. Let’s explore how to make an app for food delivery, reviewing each step in detail.

First, you must validate your idea to ensure its success. Consider what solution you would like to create: do you want to create an app for food delivery like Uber Eats, or focus on a solution for a particular restaurant?

Research the market to understand the needs and behavior of your potential users, collect customer data, and analyze trends. Evaluate your competitors to determine their strengths and weaknesses, and use this information to develop a strategy to differentiate your app from others in the market. This comprehensive validation process ensures that your app meets market requirements and has a competitive advantage.

Choosing the right monetization strategy is crucial for the success and profitability of your food delivery app. Selecting the appropriate monetization strategy will help ensure you develop a food ordering app that not only meets your expectations for covering operational costs but also generates a steady income, making it a sustainable business model.

Here are the primary monetization models you can consider for food delivery mobile app development:

• Restaurant fee: Charge restaurants a fixed fee or a percentage per order to appear on the platform. Extra fees apply for premium placement in ads or listings.
• User fee: Customers pay a fixed or dynamic delivery fee based on time or distance. Add surge pricing during peak demand to boost revenue.
• Commission from restaurants: Take a commission on each order processed through the app. You handle the payment, deduct the fee, and send the rest to the restaurant.
• Subscription model for merchants: Restaurants pay recurring fees to stay listed. Offer tiered packages with varied features for solo spots or chains.

As an alternative, for example, you can combine models: implement a base restaurant fee and offer subscriptions for better app exposure.

Once you have decided on the first requirements, you can hire a mobile app development company to build a food delivery app. You have several options:

• In-house hiring: Build your own team for full control. It’s time-consuming and expensive due to recruitment, office, and equipment costs.
• Outsourcing: Delegate full-cycle app development to an external team. It saves time and money while you focus on core business tasks.
• Outstaffing: Hire specific specialists to join your internal team remotely. You stay in charge while closing skill gaps efficiently.

Note: Cleveroad offers flexible cooperation models, including dedicated teams and staff augmentation, allowing you to scale your project based on your timeline, budget, and internal capabilities.

For example, we’d like to share with you our recent case, location-based marketplace for bars and pubs.

Cleveroad supported the El Tab team with full-cycle development services, from refining the idea to delivering a scalable and intuitive Flutter-based mobile app. Our specialists helped shape the app concept into a user-friendly, location-based subscription marketplace for bars and pubs. We selected the right tech stack, created a smooth multi-payment integration (Apple Pay and Google Pay), and built an intuitive admin panel for managing users and partner venues.

As a result, the client received a polished and functional cross-platform app delivered on time and on budget, enabling users to explore new pubs across London through weekly drink subscription.

Here’s what Oliver Carew, founder of El Tab says about cooperation with us:

Choosing a platform is an important step in developing a food delivery app. You need to decide whether your app will be native, web-based, or hybrid. Here is the specificity of each platform:

• Native apps are specific for mobile app development platforms (iOS, Android) and generally offer the best user experience and performance, but they can be more costly to build and maintain.
• Web apps run in a browser and don't require installation, making them more accessible, but they might have limited functionality.
• Cross-platform apps utilize a single codebase to achieve native-like performance across multiple platforms, balancing accessibility and development efficiency.

You can turn to cross-platform app development services if you want your food delivery service to cover multiple platforms. This option enables you to build an app for your food delivery service that works on several platforms with a single codebase, saving time and money.

Choosing a technology stack is also important to the success of online food ordering app development. It is important to select the programming languages, frameworks, databases, and other tools that will suit the needs of your food delivery solution. An experienced food delivery app developer can help you choose the right tools and technologies for your project.

Below, you can examine the basic tech stack we use at Cleveroad to deliver high-quality food delivery solutions for our clients:

A clear feature list ensures alignment with business needs and smooth development. Cleveroad runs a Solution Workshop and Discovery Phase to define essential and advanced features based on your vision and target users. We segment them into user-facing features and admin-side functionalities, forming the foundation for the project roadmap.

We start by analyzing your business goals and identifying the essential features that bring the most value. We break down the functionality into Minimal Viable Product (MVP) and full-release phases, helping you optimize your budget, prioritize development, and avoid scope creep. Our team then delivers a structured MVP scope, a detailed project plan, and an accurate cost estimate aligned with your product vision.

Examples of essential features for online food delivery app development:

• Order placement and tracking
• Real-time GPS
• Payment gateway integration
• Ratings and reviews
• Restaurant dashboard
• Courier portal

Usually, we recommend starting from a Minimum Viable Product. This is the initial version of your food delivery app that includes only the core features necessary to solve the main user problem and validate your business idea with real users. It helps reduce time-to-market, minimize development costs, and gather early feedback to guide future improvements.

Outstanding UI/UX design is crucial to make food ordering app that attracts users. A well-designed interface ensures that users can easily navigate the app, find what they're looking for, and place orders quickly and simply.

UI/UX design services include developing an intuitive navigation system and clear visuals that help users easily navigate the app, from browsing the menu to placing an order. Branding is no less important - experts will create a design that incorporates your corporate colors, logo, and fonts. This way, you will have a strong brand identity, increasing marketing effectiveness.

After finalizing the design and features, our web development team proceeds to coding. Using Agile methodology, Cleveroad structures the food delivery app development process into 2-week sprints to deliver functionality incrementally and allow for flexibility in planning.

At this stage, we handle:

• Frontend and LMS backend integration (for training courier staff, etc.)
• Third-party API integrations (Stripe, Twilio, Google Maps)
• DevOps and CI/CD pipelines for regular builds and testing
• Unit, integration, performance, and stress testing by QA engineers

Once the food delivery app creation is complete, it's time to release it. Start by submitting the app to relevant app stores, such as the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, ensuring all app store guidelines are met for a smooth approval process. After the app goes live, implement a comprehensive marketing strategy to increase visibility and attract users.

It can include social media campaigns, influencer partnerships, email marketing, and targeted ads. Use press releases and tech blogs to generate buzz around your app. Monitor user feedback and reviews closely to address issues promptly and improve user satisfaction. We also assist your team with setting up promotion-ready visuals and demo environments for your marketing campaigns, whether your app is meant for a local business or a full-scale delivery platform.

To create a food delivery app, you need to make four separate solutions for every business role. Each one requires a unique set of basic features necessary to ensure the platform's smooth operation. Let's review the functionality for all business roles in detail:

The customer food delivery apps allow placing orders, making it a crucial part of the platforms. It is critical to create a delivery app with a user-friendly and attractive UI/UX design to satisfy your target audience's needs and attract more users. The must-have features to develop a food delivery app for clients are:

Registration and login

Users can register and log in to your food delivery app effortlessly using either their email or phone number or through various social media platforms. Multiple login options, including Facebook, Google, and Apple Sign Up, increase accessibility and user registration. Ensure that password change and recovery features are readily available for user convenience.

Restaurant search

Create online food delivery app giving your customers an opportunity to search for nearby restaurants relying on their geolocation. It's hard to imagine an on-demand food delivery app without various filters to make the search process faster and more convenient. Also, you can add detailed information about restaurants so app users can learn more about eateries and choose where they prefer to order food.

Location tracking

To create a successful app, allow customers to track their orders in real-time as couriers pick them up using an integrated map feature. It would be also great if your food delivery mobile app would show the estimated delivery time. This functionality utilizes advanced location tracking technologies such as Google Location API for Android and Location Framework for iOS, ensuring accurate and seamless monitoring of delivery progress.

Order placement and payment

Make your own food delivery app with a simplified checkout process that is as simple as possible to decrease the number of abandoned orders. You can add payments via Braintree, Stripe, or PayPal. Such integration makes it easy for food delivery app users to pay for their orders. But keep in mind that these payment gateways charge fees. And don’t forget about the option to pay in cash.

Push notifications

Push notifications can help you remind users about delivery stages, such as acceptance, on its way, arrival, and so on, as on platforms like UberEats or Glovo. You can also send your customers various notifications about discounts or special offers. The best ways to develop push notifications would be:

• Amazon SNS
• Apple Push Notification Service (APSN)
• Firebase Cloud Messaging

Ratings and reviews

Feedback is an essential part of grocery delivery application development. It’ll help you see the gaps in your service and work towards its improvement. Make an option to leave a comment and rate the food and delivery process. To keep all feedback in a safe place, your team can use Microsoft Azure or AWS.

It’s all about accepting orders, getting notified, and managing menus. To make a food delivery app like UberEats for restaurants, you can focus on a web version or a native app installed on a kitchen tablet. Restaurant employees will use it to see incoming orders and notify courier when the order is ready. The key features of a restaurant app are the following:

Registration and login

This page is the gateway for authorized personnel to log into the platform securely. The registration process ensures that only authorized users can utilize the system.

Menu management

Restaurants should be able to adjust their menus so that users see up-to-date information when they decide to order. Otherwise, this may negatively impact both service and the restaurant’s reputation.

Order management

Restaurant staff needs to know all their incoming orders and work with them properly. With this feature, they can accept orders and change the order status.

Ratings and reviews

Let restaurants see comments and ratings, and don’t forget about the replying option. When discussing how to create a food ordering app, remember that communication with a customer is essential.

The delivery agent app for your restaurant should be simple, but its simplicity shouldn’t impact the smoothness of work. The courier should be able to use all the features on the go from a mobile device. To achieve fast delivery, fill delivery person app with features like:

Registration and login

As with a customer app, make authorization fast and simple. Use different social media for authorization with Facebook SDK, Google SDK, or Sign in with Apple

Navigation

Provide the courier with convenient navigation through the city with the fastest routes and different destination marks (pickup address, delivery address, and so on). Your development team can use Google Maps Platform for Android and Location Framework for iOS.

Order detail and status

To understand how to start a food delivery app, it’s necessary to give the courier all order information, including precise meal content, customer address, and delivery time. Also, don’t forget about order statuses to let the courier accept or reject the orders.

Order history

Order history provides a detailed record of all deliveries completed by the courier. You can save all completed orders using cloud-based systems like Azure, AWS, and Digital Ocean.

This is the command center of your business. All features here are created to manage information and to develop your business strategy. Let’s dive into must-have admin panel features:

Admin login

This login screen typically includes an ID and password system, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive administrative functionalities.

Restaurant manager

This option will let your admin add different restaurants to the platform or manually delete them (for example, if customer ratings are too low or restaurants cease partnership with your app).

App analytics

With this feature, you can track important things like the most popular restaurants and sort them by profit, average check, etc. This information will give you a better understanding of the business and useful tips for better business development.

Payment management

With this feature included in the online food order app development, admins can change delivery fees. For example, you may want to reconsider fees for eateries bringing you a lot of orders to encourage them to use your delivery platform only.

Discount and coupon control

Offering discounts to users is an important strategy for encouraging existing users to order or attracting new ones. You can manage discounts based on different holidays and special occasions.

Creating a food delivery app involves more than just developing robust software; it requires careful planning, attention to regulatory requirements, and a focus on user satisfaction. Here are some key tips to ensure your app stands out in the competitive market:

A food ordering app should deliver a frictionless experience, from registration to checkout. Users expect quick loading times, intuitive navigation, real-time order updates, and secure payments. Poor UX directly leads to high bounce rates and abandoned carts. Focus on streamlined flows, minimal steps per order, also Include UI accessibility for all user types.

Cleveroad expert tip: Our team uses rapid prototyping and user testing during the Discovery phase to validate design logic and ensure it supports high user engagement and low drop-off rates. If you're wondering how to create a food delivery app that retains users, it all starts with thoughtful UX.

Real-time functionality like courier tracking, order status updates, or inventory availability boosts customer trust and satisfaction. Use WebSocket or Firebase for instant updates, and integrate reliable location services like Google Maps API or Mapbox. Ensure your system syncs across platforms so updates reflect instantly in the user, courier, and admin apps. To build a food delivery app that truly competes, real-time data sync is essential.

Scalability is essential if you want your food delivery app to grow with your business. A modular backend architecture (e.g., microservices) allows you to add features or update specific parts of the system without disrupting operations. For example, you can independently scale the payment service or recommendation engine during peak usage.

Cleveroad expert tip: In one of our projects for a multi-city food delivery startup, we implemented containerized services with Kubernetes and AWS autoscaling, allowing the app to seamlessly handle load spikes on weekends. This approach is ideal if you aim to make a food delivery app capable of handling long-term growth.

Add in-depth analytics dashboards for admins and restaurant partners to monitor order trends, best-selling items, delivery times, and user behaviors. This enables data-driven decisions like adjusting delivery fees, managing menus, or launching location-specific promotions. Use tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or custom-built dashboards to visualize data and uncover valuable patterns for business growth.

If you’re aiming to create a food delivery app that stands out and delivers a smooth, satisfying user experience, it’s essential to incorporate the latest industry trends. Consider adding them now or planning them for future updates after the success of your MVP.

Following the ongoing shift in consumer behavior, contactless delivery is a standard expectation. This feature allows users to opt for minimal interaction with couriers by selecting “leave at door” or “contact-free handoff” options during checkout. It also includes in-app instructions, real-time delivery tracking, and photo confirmation of drop-off. Adding this feature not only improves safety and hygiene but also expands your app’s appeal to health-conscious users and families.

Integrating AI-based logistics systems helps couriers choose the fastest, most fuel-efficient routes. These algorithms analyze real-time traffic, weather, and road conditions to minimize delivery time. For food delivery apps, this results in better courier performance, fewer late orders, and improved customer satisfaction. It also reduces operational costs and carbon footprint, which can be a major win for sustainability-focused businesses.

Instead of ordering one meal at a time, users increasingly prefer flexible subscription options that offer daily, weekly, or monthly delivery of pre-selected meals. These plans can include discounts, loyalty rewards, and personalization based on dietary preferences or ordering history. Subscription models improve user retention, create predictable revenue streams, and help restaurants optimize ingredient sourcing and prep schedules.

Today’s food delivery platforms go beyond restaurants. By partnering with nearby grocery stores, they can offer users access to household essentials, fresh produce, and more. This strategy opens new revenue channels and attracts a broader audience, especially busy families or users looking to consolidate their food and grocery needs in one app. APIs and inventory sync tools make real-time product availability and substitutions easier to manage across locations.

How much does it cost to build a food ordering app? There is no universal answer to this question, since the final price depends on various factors, including the development team’s location and expertise, project scope, platforms to cover, tech stack, etc. The cost of a food delivery app development also depends on the feature set and its complexity. The more features you want to implement, the higher the final price will be.

Here’s a general cost breakdown on how to build a food delivery app by complexity:

• Basic food delivery app: $40,000 - $70,000
• Medium complexity app: $70,000 - $120,000
• Advanced app: $120,000 - $200,000+

We’ve made our own estimate based on the must-have features to build a food delivery app. The estimate below is APPROXIMATE and based on the average hourly rate in Central and Eastern Europe ($50/h).

When it comes to food delivery app development,the functionality you choose has the biggest impact on both the timeline and total cost. Each feature requires a different level of effort, from backend integrations to user interface complexity. The more advanced or customized your app needs to be, the more time and resources it will take. To give you a clearer picture, we’ve calculated an estimated development cost based on the features most commonly included in an MVP version. This breakdown can help you plan and prioritize what to include in your first release.

Please note: This estimate includes only the expenses to develop the basic app version. The costs for UI/UX design, Project Management, and Quality assurance are not included and are calculated separately. If you want to get an estimate considering requirements for your specific food delivery application development concept, feel free to order an estimate.

Cleveroad is a software development company with 13+ years of experience in creating digital solutions for restaurants, food chains, and catering services. We help businesses boost their performance and increase profits by providing full-scope IT services: mobile app development, web development, cross-platform app development, IT consulting, cloud development, UI/UX design, legacy software modernization, etc.

What benefits do you get by applying to Cleveroad?

• Cleveroad provides full-cycle mobile and web development using Kotlin, Swift, Flutter, and React Native tailored to food delivery solutions.
• We implement ISO/IEC 27001:2013 – certified data protection practices, ensuring secure user authentication, payment processing, and order tracking.
• You get ISO 9001:2015 quality assurance, with expert QA engineers testing each feature to meet top usability and reliability standards.
• We offer flexible engagement models, including Dedicated Team and IT Staff Augmentation, customized for your delivery app needs.
• Our cross-platform development approach helps you launch iOS and Android apps faster and more affordably without sacrificing performance.
• We guide you through a free Solution Design Workshop to define the food delivery app’s architecture, feature list, and tech feasibility.
• Cleveroad handles seamless integrations with Stripe, PayPal, Google Maps, Twilio, Toast POS, Zendesk, and more to power essential app functions.

As the business logic of food delivery apps aligns with on-demand software solutions, we want to share our experience in this field. Recently, our team created a P2P services providers marketplace called AYIO.

A Social Business Platform partnered with Cleveroad to build AYIO – a mobile-first platform that allows users to both offer and book custom services across various fields. The goal was to create a simple, intuitive application that would support dual user roles (customer and vendor) while staying within the client's MVP budget.

Cleveroad’s team of 15 specialists developed the cross-platform app using Flutter, enabling quick role-switching within a single account. We focused on creating a seamless UI/UX experience and built core functionality, including geolocation-based service listings, real-time notifications, user management, and secure communication. Backend architecture was tailored to support high performance and future scalability.

As a result, the client launched a clean, intuitive MVP with responsive performance and full support for custom services booking. Cleveroad’s technical expertise and clear development process helped the client validate their business model and move confidently toward scaling the platform.

Here is what our client Cohen Ben Frei, the founder of AYIO, says about cooperation with Cleveroad: