This is a dumb article. There are plenty of companies that offer iPhone apps cheaper than this service. Mobile applications are powerful because of the connection they build between the business and their customers. For restaurants especially, repeat business is more important than acquiring new customers.

Name one custom restaurant iPhone app company that offers a service cheaper than $15/month with no setup fees.

Agreed that repeat business is more important than acquiring new customers, but how do you figure that 100% of your repeat business has an iPhone?

My company is one of the ones listed above (http://www.blueshoemobile.com) and while there is a place for a mobile site, it's still hard to beat the ease of use of a native App. With our apps, customers can place orders as well so it's easy to see an ROI for the restaurant, all they need is one order to pay for the app.

I can dispute the claim that no one will download the app or keep it on their phone as our restaurants get more than their share of downloads. With out Android apps, we can also see how many people keep it on their phone and I can tell you they do.

We had this same debate at Blue Shoe, native or web and chose native and I'm glad we did.

Eddie Peloke
Owner
Blue Shoe Mobile

Hi Eddie,

Thanks for this thoughtful response. To address some of your points:

1. Native versus web: Without question, native apps which take advantage of hardware acceleration will be faster. The caveat, of course, is that Android and iPhone are do not represent 100% of smartphone users, and so you end up needing to maintain code for several codebases and still end up missing BlackBerry, Palm, Nokia and more. Additionally, in terms of use cases, it is more common to seek out the restaurant's web site on your phone during the discovery process–say, to look up a menu for a restaurant you've never been to–than to go to the App Store and check to see if the restaurant has an app.

2. Placing orders: our experience is that ordering from a smartphone is often a problem looking for a solution. POS integration, PCI compliance: these make ordering a non-trivial process in its full implementation (credit card saving, favorites history).

3. Downloads aside, if you want to compare restaurant menus to decide where to eat that night, it seems unlikely that you're going to want to download 6 apps to do so. And at what point is it cumbersome to have 10, ro 20, similar restaurant apps on your phone that you seldom use?

We do think that big brands can potentially get a good amount of marketing/advertising from a well-designed iPhone/Android app. For small, 1-5 location restaurants, we think something affordable that integrates with the existing website is a more optimal solution.

We originally offered custom iPhone app for restaurants, but as we collected feedback from restaurant owners, we realized that we needed to support a larger number of devices and that users were more likely to go to the restaurant's website on their phone than download an app just to see a menu.

Thanks for the article. I see your point regarding the ROI for a single restaurant vs a large, well established chain. However I believe you've left out an important category: the small to medium sized local chains that could very well benefit from the combination of an iPhone GPS app to locate any nearby locations, the quickest way to get there and possibly picking up a to go order. If you're an iPhone user as you say, you know that you love your killer apps that you use all the time. If, for example you love Local Joe's Pizza and his twelve locations, it's a no brainer that you'd always use Local Joe's iPhone App to find the nearest stop during your busy day running around town. And a Top Three Favorites Lunches to tap on and order? I'd probably use it as much as my Cheap Gas and Maps app. As for price, anybody who'd looked into it knows the iPhone SDK is free, and to post an app it's less than $200.

Hi Regi,

Thanks for your comments. I entirely agree that custom apps can be valuable for small to medium sized chains as well.

My main point was that it's important to think about how large of an audience you'll actually be able to engage with an iPhone app. For small restaurants – iPhone owners aren't going to be a particularly large percentage of your customer base, and then you also have to consider what subset of them are interested in downloading your app and keeping it on their phones.

The other thing to consider is that features like GPS location don't require a native app to implement: modern phones support it right out of the browser (and indeed, ChompStack's mobile websites support geolocating the nearest location too).

Regarding the price, I was referring more to the development costs of getting the app built (which most restaurants cannot do in house and have to outsource).

What if I told you a customer recieved $3,000.00 in iPhone orders their first month in Business? Do you see an ROI if the customer paid for a fraction of that?

There is also a strategy to increase APP and Brand recognition that leads to results like this. Do some more research before making your point on how customers are doing.

And BTW your point of already having a website is like the guy in the office 15 years ago that said why use e-mail, when you can make a phone call. Same thing buddy

Hi Dustin,

Interesting arguments. Did your customer receive $3000 in phone orders in the first month, or was that speculation? It certainly sounds like great rhetorical ROI. Could you name the customer so we could check out their app?

Increasing brand recognition is certainly important, but I'm not sure the App Store is really the way to increase a small restaurant's brand recognition. It's crucial to note that we don't advocate against large brand creating iPhone apps (especially when those include ordering), but doubt that most of the smaller guys can fundamentally benefit from it on any level.

To address your “already having a website” argument: the question is, where are your users going to find information about your restaurant? Is it more likely that they're going to the App Store, or to your website? What we're proposing is less like using a phone call as opposed to email and more like making good use of your website in a mobile context, which is actually more revolutionary than an app, as apps have been around for quite a while (see: BlackBerry apps), while mobile sites are new, sparkly creatures which propose to make your data more MVC, if you get my drift.

Cheers,
Christine Meranda

[...] to where you are.  While having your own mobile application isn’t necessary (many think it’s overkill) the key will be staying in tune with other apps that exist and tapping into the mobile ecosystem. [...]

This is a great article, and this article is very right. Unless I were obsessed with a restaurant, there’s no way in hell I’d download an app for every place I want to try. It’s much faster for me to go to a mobile site than to go to the app store and wait for a download. I, like most Americans (don’t deny this one bit!) don’t have the patience to wait for that when I can just get the site. My iphone is already almost out of space and I’d much rather put more music on it than an app for a restaurant I will go to once in two months.

This article is as wrong today as it was a year ago.  (please remove it or update it please!)

An app on any mobile phone is the best of all possible customer loyalty program….You can build apps for restaurants or any other business for as little as $720 per year.  One app that works on iPhone, another app that works on Android plus a free HTML5 site that works on any device connected to the intranet.  Contact Bob@PhoneSmartApps:disqus .com

I think this article is required to be reframed. We make apps for restaurants and they get orders through their iPhone apps. Our apps allows users to select food items, add to cart and send orders to the restaurants and takeaways. Check out timeappsshop.com