The mobile app space saw huge growth over the last year because of COVID-19-related lock-downs and people often having to quarantine. Now that most lockdowns are lifted, the habits picked up during the pandemic have been sticking around. According to Apple, smartphone apps for grocery, food delivery, and fitness are the fastest growing categories of the past six months, even outpacing news and dating apps, which traditionally have large amounts of downloads. In this week’s article, we’ll explore some of the apps that are being used in this category.

Instacart
Instacart is the world’s largest online grocery and product service. It offers you the ability to shop from home from stores near you (they work with over 500 retailers!) and have your orders delivered to your home via a personal shopper or pick it up curbside at a local store. The app allows you to track your order’s progress and communicate with your shopper throughout the ordering process. While no membership is required to use Instacart, there are delivery, service,  and pickup fees. Fees start at $3.99 for same-day orders over $35 but are variable depending on the items ordered, such as alcohol.

Mobile Laundry and Dry Cleaning
While there are few nationwide mobile laundry companies, more and more local companies are offering this type of service. Some companies, like SudShare, offer mobile laundry and dry cleaning services in over 300 cities in the US. Most of these businesses offer next-day service. In other words, they pick up today and deliver tomorrow.

Durham Delivers
MOBLZ is headquartered in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina, so we pay attention to local companies making a mark in the mobile and delivery spaces. Durham Delivers offers food delivery from independent Durham restaurants. The service was created to help local restaurants whose dining rooms were shuttered during the pandemic. It provided an outlet for restaurants to use, and more options for customers without having all of the fees associated with some of the more well-known delivery apps.

NC Modern Furniture
NC Modern Furniture is a niche company that offers delivery services for IKEA stores in North Carolina. If you’ve ever been to IKEA, you know it can be an all-day experience. This company will drive to the store, do the shopping for you, and deliver your order to your home. This service can easily save you hours of effort! Before the pandemic hit, they also offered assembly services. They hope to offer that service again soon.

Foodsby
Foodsby is another restaurant service that offers contact-free delivery at a lower cost than many similar services. Most orders are delivered for just $1.99 and there is an option to get unlimited deliveries for $9.99 per month. There is no minimum order required. The local restaurant cooks, packages, and delivers the meal, with no third party involved.

Fooda
Fooda, another restaurant delivery service, is designed mainly to provide food for people at work. They have partnered with over 2000 restaurants to offer a wide variety of options. One particular unique event they provide is the Popup restaurant, where a new restaurant every day comes to the work site to offer meals. Fooda describes it as having a different indoor food truck everyday.

From all of the new and existing companies in this space, it seems like delivery and service apps are here to stay.