So, picture the scene. You’re home after a long hard day and you’re hungry. Sure, you could head back out again and queue up in a chip shop, curry house or Chinese. Yes, you could keep hammering re-dial on your phone to trying to get through to your local takeaway but.. really, there has to be another way?
The hungryhouse app has been reviewed here before on the iPhone, but we wanted to have a look at the new Android app.
First up, this app is good for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s quick. You can sit on the bus and order your meal, even if the restaurant you choose is open later. You can also re-order a meal you’ve had recently, which really reduces the clicks.
The best bits? Well, for a start you get full menus, including those “little” things like drinks. Menus are divided into sections too, so it makes it easy to navigate. Before you get to that there’s a review system, so you can see what other users thought about those restaurants and takeaways.
But first, lets get started. The first screen asks you where you are. You can put in a postcode for your current address or one you’re heading to. You could even just use GPS.
You’ll need to create an account to get the best from this app, and I ended up going onto my laptop for this bit as it dropped out during the registration process. Once it has the location you’ll receive a list of local independent takeaways that have signed up. This is a hit-and-miss affair, and the guys from hungryhouse freely admit this. The app details actually states this in block-capitals, and it’s not totally their fault – they’d love to get more and more restaurants signed up I’m sure. At work there were about 20 takeaways listed, but at home there were three, and they all served Indian food – something my wife doesn’t like much.
So, I decided to buy stacks of chips for my lovely fellow colleagues. The app lets you store multiple addresses too, so you can click on the location (Work or Home, let’s say) for an even quicker experience. I clicked onto Hill Fish and Chips in sunny Shelton, Stoke-on-Trent. Oh yes, glamour and style, that’s me. 🙂
The order was big, and I must confess that the app crashed as I was trying to enter credit card details but did, thankfully, keep the order when I went back into the app.
Ordering food, as you can see from these pics, is easy enough and there’s a been a lot of thought put in here. You can order something, select how many you want, whether you want salad, mayonnaise, BBQ sauce, yoghurt or click on “Special requests” to add your own notes. I did this on one order where we wanted “Just a bit of curry sauce” instead of the normal amount. That attention to detail means that your order is exactly what you want instead of something like you want. Like it. Have a look below under “Special Requests”..
As you order the little basket (on the top right) updates so you can keep an eye on costs, plus you can re-order meal you’ve had before by clicking the “History” tab – this really speeds things up if you’re in a hurry and want the same order again, and it’ll sort your orders based on location, so you can see the orders you placed at work and the ones you placed at home for example.
Once you place your order it’ll update you on how things are going. You’ll get an email too, and if the restaurant in question need to contact you then they can do so easily.
I liked the way that all the restaurants are rated – they have star ratings and comments from other users a a real decision-maker for me. I chose Hills Fish & Chips purely because all the comments and ratings were high, plus this app made the chip shop owner keen to delivery my order quickly and correctly.
When you’ve finished ordering your meal there’s an array of payment methods, and you can setup an “account” too if you’d like to pay that way. It’s all fairly painless.
Overall, I liked this app because (a) you knew whether the restaurant was “good” ahead of time (b) you weren’t stuck listening to an engaged tone (c) it saved your order for super quick re-orders and (d) it made the restaurant “want” to provide good service, because they’d know that customers would be prompted to rate them. I also liked the fact that you could order “now” or order for “later”. I was able to do this order first thing in the morning and explicitly ask the restaurant to deliver at lunch. Lots of delivery slots are available and you can even choose a delivery when the restaurant is open.
Sure, I’d like a few more choices of restaurant to choose from, it did crash on me, but the app itself ticked all the boxes for me.
Oh, and I must recommend Hills Fish and Chips too. The food was very tasty indeed and I left a comment within the app too. Thanks for the fish and chips 🙂
Give the app itself a try below or visit their site for more info. We’ve got stacks of images in the gallery below too..
Links – HungryHouse.co.uk – iPhone App – Android App
