Building a food delivery app: the Nibblify example

Three audiences, three apps: who does what in an order?

A food order involves three people with different tasks and different screens. The customer looks for a dish, fills a basket, pays and tracks the delivery. The restaurant accepts the order, prepares it and keeps its menu, offers and opening hours up to date. The driver starts a shift, accepts a run, follows the route to the restaurant and then to the customer, and confirms the handover.

Putting all three roles in one app would force everyone through screens that are not theirs, and every update would affect everyone. Separate apps can fit their audience: according to the article “How We Built Nibblify”, the driver app is built to stay light on the low-end phones that drivers actually carry.

Nibblify follows this split, with one app per role on the App Store and Google Play. The three screens below follow the steps of an order.

Step 1 · The customer orders

Nibblify Food

The customer browses a restaurant’s menu, filters dishes and fills the basket.

App Store Google Play

Step 2 · The restaurant prepares

Nibblify Partner

The kitchen display lists new orders to accept or reject, then orders in preparation to mark as ready.

App Store Google Play

Step 3 · The driver delivers

Nibblify Driver

A delivery request shows the restaurant to collect from, the distance and the estimated earnings, with a countdown to accept it.

App Store Google Play

App visuals with demonstration data: the restaurants, amounts, distances and earnings shown are fictitious.

Zakaryae Ait Ouamer’s role, the technologies and the current status of the project are summarised in the Nibblify case study.

What does the backend of a food delivery app do?

The backend is the invisible part everything depends on: it signs users in, records orders, calculates amounts, assigns runs and notifies each person at the right time. At Nibblify, the three apps and the operations portal share a single Firebase backend. The article “How We Built Nibblify”, published on 5 August 2026, lists its services: Authentication, Firestore, Storage, Messaging, Remote Config, App Check, Crashlytics and Analytics. Hand-written security rules protect its 47 collections, 1,119 lines of rules in all: in the article’s words, the database is the contract between all four apps.

Sensitive decisions are made on the server

At Nibblify, the sensitive logic runs in 238 Cloud Functions written in JavaScript, about 25,500 lines according to the same article. They handle orders, payouts, driver assignment, AES-256 encryption of personal data, exports of that data on request, push notifications and the admin API. Google Maps provides location.

Why on the server? An app installed on a phone can be outdated, modified or offline, so a price, a run or a payout has to be decided in one place that every app consults. Privacy follows the same logic: according to the “About Nibblify” page, personal data is encrypted with AES-256 before it reaches the database.

The operations portal, the app customers never see

A delivery platform also needs work behind the scenes: verifying a restaurant before it goes live, checking drivers’ documents, helping a customer whose order went wrong. At Nibblify, these tasks run through an internal Flutter Web portal, separate from the consumer apps and absent from the stores.

The article “How We Built Nibblify” describes its scope: restaurant verification, driver documents and wallets, order support, live maps, analytics and monitoring, with 102 admin-only Cloud Functions behind it. At 49,900 lines of code, it is the second-largest of the four apps, after the customer app. The takeaway for your budget: the operations tool is not a last-minute extra, it is an app in its own right.

One Flutter codebase for iOS, Android and the web

According to the article “How We Built Nibblify”, all four apps share one language, Dart 3.10, and one UI toolkit, Flutter, with Riverpod, Provider and go_router, so iOS, Android and the web come out of a single codebase. In practice, each mobile app is written once and published on both stores, and the portal uses the same technology in the browser.

The table reproduces the line counts published in the article, measured on 2 August 2026, excluding dependencies and generated files. They show the relative size of each part, not a timeline or a cost.

Across the whole platform, including parts not shown in the table, the article counts 307,000 hand-written lines, excluding generated files, by one person working with frontier AI models, a method it calls “vibe engineering”. Zakaryae Ait Ouamer sets the intent, the architecture and the data model; the models write the first drafts, which are read line by line; and the repository provides the proof, with 296 Dart test files, emulator-backed integration tests and security-rule tests.

Two details that matter in production

In production, a price can change while a customer hesitates, and the same dish can be spelled several ways. Nibblify handles both cases, and any food delivery app should plan for them.

Publishing three apps on two stores: dates, fees and lead times

Three apps on two stores means six listings to prepare, get reviewed and keep up to date. The Nibblify apps are published under the developer name “Zakaryae Ait Ouamer”, with one account per store, and are free. They reached the App Store one after another:

1. 16 January 2026: Nibblify Partner, the restaurant app
2. 9 March 2026: Nibblify Food, the customer app
3. 8 September 2026: Nibblify Driver, the driver app

All three received an App Store update on 16 October 2026.

Store accounts are opened in your name, and one account can publish several apps, so three apps cost no more in store fees than one.

How much does a food delivery app cost, and how long does it take?

A delivery platform matches my Multi-app platform package: from €16,900 excluding tax, with a typical timeline of 4–6 months. It brings together the building blocks described in this guide:

This is a starting price, excluding tax, valid until 31 December 2026; the written quote sets the final price according to the screens, roles and integrations. This price says nothing about what Nibblify cost to build, which is not published. Store accounts, hosting and Firebase usage are billed to you directly by their providers.

For a single app, with its add-ons and maintenance, see the guide to how much a mobile app costs.

What is not done yet

This guide is based on a published product, not on a service in operation. As of 22 October 2026:

• Nibblify has not opened customer ordering yet; its website says delivery in Le Mans, France, is being prepared.
• Nibblify signed a pre-incubation agreement with Le Mans Innovation on 4 August 2026, which remains in place while the launch is prepared.
• No usage figures are published: no order numbers, revenue or user counts.
• The screens shown here contain demonstration data.
• Behaviour under real load, with real customers and drivers, remains to be seen after launch.

What can be checked today: the three apps on the stores, their release dates and the architecture described by their developer.