In recent years the Zomato app with its wide variety of restaurants and halal dining option has been adequate for my search of a decent halal restaurant. Now there is a new app which has been released and it caters specifically for the needs of outgoing hungry Muslim.
The app is titled 'The Halal Dining Club', it has only been released on the App store so Android users will have to wait a little longer for their chance to use the app. It is currently launched in two countries, Singapore and the UK. I will be reviewing the UK version.
Usability
The app is very user-friendly and is easy to from the word 'Go'. The apps layout is simple, has little to no slowdown and I haven't managed to find any bugs or glitches yet. This is all great in comparison to their competitors such as the Trip Advisor app which can get pretty slow and may crash on occasion.
Design
At first, glances the app isn't very appealingly to the eye. The brown layout mixed with the beige highlights makes the app seem very bland and boring especially in comparison to Zomato, Trip Advisor and Yelp, all three look a lot more appealing. The app logo on the iPhone's home screen looks far more appealing with a white background and golden beige lettering, they should've definitely gone with more bright colors inside the app.
Filters
Filters are used to aid your search for restaurants and make the process even easier, helping you to choose by cuisine, location, etc. One thing which this app does remarkably well is it gives you a whole host of filters to choose from such as a ton of cuisines, some you may have never heard of. It also gives you the option of filtering out restaurants which serve alcohol or aren't Muslim owned.
Restaurants
Well, this is the major problem of the app right here, there is a very noticeable lack of restaurants currently. Most of the restaurants which are noted on the app are already available as halal options in other competitive non-halal centric apps. The app does allow the ability for the user to submit newer restaurants but this means the success of the app relies heavily on the ability for it to garner a large interactive user base which will be very difficult for them to do especially in the early stages of the app release.
Conclusion
Well is it any good? Well, the design and usability are great and filters show a lot of potential but the lack of restaurants is striking. It'd be very difficult to recommend the app currently, primarily due to the lack of restaurants available but saying that even bigger apps struggle to gain restaurants onto their apps. Another positive is the submit a restaurant features the ability for the apps resume of restaurants to grow significantly but it does require they to be a user base there in the first place. My final thought is to download the app to try out for yourself as it has a lot of potential but I think personally it doesn't give me enough reasons to switch completely from the Zomato app with its halal dining options