Three of my favourite things in life are Android, pizza and coffee. Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered that Dominos Pizza has launched an Android app for the UK and the Republic of Ireland! I can now order pizza on my Android phone, while drinking coffee – it’s hard to see how life gets any better!
Of course, exciting as that may be, it may not count for much if the app does not work very well and there are one or two teething problems with it.
The app looks fine on initial inspection, although the colour scheme seems to be a little too blue. I understand the need to use the colours in your branding, but the dominos website has always made decent use of good old fashioned white. Colours aside, though, the app looks good.
Users are initially presented with a form to enter their postcode in order to start a delivery order, as well as a list of nearby stores to order for collection. Quite why the two approaches (delivery or collection) need to be separated like this is a bit of a mystery. Given that the app knows where I am, using location services, why can I not select one of the nearby stores for delivery? But I can’t – if I need pizza delivered then I have to enter my postcode.
Having either selected a store or entered my postcode, the app then downloads the menu and offers for that particular store. This is a nice touch as any current offers are available through the app. If I’m ordering on a Tuesday, for example, then the “Two for Tuesday” offer becomes available.
The process of actually ordering the pizza is fairly straightforward and painless. Payment, however, is a little disappointing. For a start, there is no way to be certain that your payment details are being sent over a secure connection (https/ssl). They probably are but, given that you can’t be certain, are you going to take the risk that your credit card details are being sent over an unencrypted connection?
Even better still, the app should integrate with Paypal and allow users to pay that way. Or even using in-app billing – both of which are secure and remember my payment details. As it stands, I have to enter my payment details every time I want to make an order and I cannot be absolutely certain that they are safe.
This is a massive failure in my opinion. It wouldn’t be hard to either allow Paypal or Google to take the payment for both ease of use and peace of mind. Dominos might have to give the firm a small cut but, given that I would guess the company make at least £10 per pizza, that wouldn’t hurt them too much.
The bottom line here is whether or not this app is a better, or at least comparable, alternative to the website or phoning in an order. If you can’t find the menu card lying around then it is at least a better option than phoning in an order. But the app is prone to crashing and, on my second attempt to order, failed to take payment altogether. In fairness to Dominos, that may have been the fault of my bank, but if the firm had chosen a better payment system then it would not have been an issue.
Hopefully this app will improve, despite the lack of any updates so far. I will probably continue to try and use it when I want pizza, but that’s more because of the geeky thrill I get out of ordering pizza on my Android phone! For most users I would recommend picking up the phone or going online instead.
It is with something of a heavy heart that I “award” the Dominos Android app a 4/10
The app is now available for download on the Android Market
