The grocery app market is booming, with more customers joining in to ease their daily grocery buying requirements. As per a study by Statista, the number of adult grocery app users has seen substantial growth from 2017 (12 million) to 2022 (30.4 million). This shows that the grocery app market has a promising potential to expand even further as people of most age groups – young adults (18-30) and adults (30+)- are potential users of online apps.
Hence it is only natural that you want to develop a grocery app. The most important question is how to build your grocery app. Well, there are two approaches you can take – custom grocery app development or clone grocery app development. Both have their merits and demerits. Which one is your ideal grocery app development solution? Let’s find out –
What is clone grocery app development?
Any clone app refers to pre-made app solutions that can be directly picked up and used for your business. It comes with a ready architecture and pre-written code that can be modified or tweaked minorly to match your business requirements, and you would have an app ready to be deployed.
This results in faster and cheaper app development for clients. Most often, clone apps are based on market-leading apps in that niche. For grocery, you will find many clone app solutions such as Instacart, 7Now, Walmart, and more.
Opting for cloning a grocery app has its benefits and limitations. We should analyze them carefully before deciding between clone and custom grocery app development solutions.
Benefits of Clone Grocery App Development
Here are some of the top benefits of developing a clone grocery app solution for your business requirements –
Cost-Effective
One of the biggest benefits of clone grocery app development that appeals to businesses is its extreme cost-efficiency in getting an app up and working. Since clone apps are replicas of popular grocery apps, developers can easily copy from the original while modifying it a little.
Faster Time to Market
Since clone apps come with pre-built codes and ready-to-deploy architecture, developing a customized grocery app that is ready to be published on mobile app stores takes significantly less time.
Marketed Tested
One of the most significant advantages of clone grocery app development is someone else does the homework for you. The creator of clone scripts keeps grocery app development best practices in mind and tests their solutions for technicalities and customer satisfaction. Hence, your clone grocery app is, to a reasonable extent – failproof. This also reduces the requirement of conducting proper testing, which can be expensive.
Limitations of Clone Grocery App Development
Like the many advantages of Clone Grocery App Development, there are many limitations. Keep these in mind before deciding on the clone app approach –
Limited Customization
Since clone app development is inspired by already popular apps in the market and the architecture is pre-built, the developers don’t get to modify the app at the core, both for functionalities and design. Sure, you can make decent enough modifications, but if you plan to create a proper brand identity with a clone app, it is highly unlikely.
Extremely Vulnerable to Security Threats
Clone apps are essential app solutions for small businesses that want to get an app out quickly and without dependency on professional app developers. While this provides convenience, it forsakes security. Securing a clone app is next to impossible compared to custom grocery app security measures. You might put your customers’ financial and sensitive data at risk of exploitation with a clone app.
Users Device Impact
With clone apps, you have less to no control over important aspects such as your app’s storage, battery consumption, and phone memory consumption. Hence, with clone apps, there is always the risk of slowing down the user’s phone, using up the phone’s precious resources for itself and causing a sluggish mobile experience for the user.
App Store Rejection Possibilities
It is also very difficult to find genuine sources of script apps; hence if your source is illegitimate or unlicensed, your app may get rejected by the Apple App Store or Google Play Store based on Copyrights Violation. This negatively impacts the developer account and wastes your time and money investment into getting such a solution.
What is custom grocery app development?
Custom grocery app, as the name suggests, is a customized grocery app development approach where you hire an on-demand app development company to build your grocery app solution from scratch.
Here there is no ready-made or pre-written code/architecture. You would first create a project requirement document where you would note down all the features you expect your app to have, your potential target audience, and other essential aspects of your app development requirement.
This results in a much longer app development process. Still, your app is a unique solution; you get control over the development, design, security, and all other aspects of your mobile app.
Naturally, opting for a custom grocery app has merits and demerits. Let us understand them better to make an informed choice on the right approach for your grocery app project –
Benefits of Custom Grocery App Development
Here are the many benefits of choosing custom grocery app solutions –
Unique and Brand-Driven App
Unlike clone apps that remain similar at the base with minor modifications, developing a custom grocery app ensures your app has its uniqueness and authenticity. You can customize your app to any extent as per your liking.
Scope of Scalability
Custom apps are developed from scratch; hence they are highly scalable. Their limit is only defined by the scope and vision of your business. If you need to expand into other services or add more features, the same can be done with ease with a team of dedicated developers. Updating your app to provide more services is always better than having to entirely create a new app to accommodate all the changes and then ask your existing user base to shift apps.
Proper Security
With custom app development, you have many security options to choose from. Depending on project needs, you can select on-premise or leverage cloud storage. For enterprise-grade apps, you can assign different roles and authentication levels to maintain a hierarchy of control in the organization. Such intense accessibility cannot be attained with a script app.
Better Revenues
A custom app costs a fortune compared to clone apps but also yields better revenues. A custom grocery app, if developed by an experienced team of developers, will have all the right features that motivate customers to spend more time on the app and increase the chances of conversions. Custom apps are built with the target audience in mind; hence they target their pain points and motivators much better.
Limitations of Custom Grocery App Development
Here are the limitations of custom grocery app development –
Time-to-Market
If you are in a rush with crushing deadlines, then a custom grocery app might not be your best solution. Such projects take the proper time and planning to get the best results. Since the developer team needs to take care of development, design, testing, security, and all other aspects of the app, it naturally leads to a longer market launch time.
Requires heavy Initial Funding
Though we mentioned that custom grocery apps turn out to be more revenue driven in the long term, it still does require you to raise significant capital in the initial stages. This can be problematic for SMEs.
Final Words
These are the two approaches to developing the next grocery app you can select. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. Hence you need to understand your project requirements and priorities to choose which of the two is best suitable for you.
Author Bio
Ronak Patel is a CEO and Founder of Aglowid IT Solutions, an ever-emerging Top Web and Mobile Development company with a motto of turning clients into successful businesses. He believes that Client’s success is company’s success and so that he always makes sure that Aglowid helps their client’s business to reach to its true potential with the help of his best team with the standard development process he set up for the company.
