Foodspotting helps you find the best dishes nearby
Different from other popular food-finding apps like Yelp and Urbanspoon, Foodspotting is all about the dishes, rather than the restaurants.
Looking for the best place to get a specific dish in your area? Foodspotting for Android can help.
Say you're looking for the best snickerdoodle cookie in San Francisco. You could run a search on Yelp, which would pull up a list of all the bakeries and restaurants in the area that make them. But then you'd have to look at each profile, one by one, and click through to see pictures of each restaurant's cookies...if there are pictures of its cookies. If that sounds too tedious, then try Foodspotting for Android.
Searching on Foodspotting is all about looking at pictures of specific dishes. So, in the case of the cookies, all you'd have to do is search for "snickerdoodle" to pull up a gallery of snickerdoodle pictures from bakeries and restaurants nearby. With a single tap, you can immediately hide the pictures you like or bookmark the ones that catch your eye.
Once you find a cookie picture that's up to snuff (fat and gooey, please), then you can easily tap through to see where such a perfect cinnamon treat can be had. After that, you can even see pictures of other dishes served at that particular place. Sounds convenient, right?
If you decide to sign up for a Foodspotting account, you get even more functionality. For one, you can mark a dish as Want, Tried, or Loved. These marks help other users know whether a dish is good or not, and are important to the Foodspotting community as a whole. Also, you can add your own photos of dishes if you've already tried them.
One thing I love about Foodspotting is that it comes integrated with Scoutmob, a popular discount app that I happen to be a fan of. If you tap the Specials tab at the top of the screen, you can see all the Scoutmob deals in your area, almost all of which offer 50-percent-off discounts.
As useful as Foodspotting is for finding great dishes, I can't help but feel the app is still missing something. Call me a Yelp fanboy, but I'd love to see ratings for restaurants as a whole. It would be great information to have alongside the copious pictures of dishes. Regardless, I still think Foodspotting is incredibly useful, and I highly recommend it for seasoned foodies and casual diners alike.
Foodspotting for Android is available for free download now on Google Play. It's worth mentioning that there's also an iOS version of Foodspotting, which offers a few more features than the Android version at the moment. Hopefully the app's developers will be able to bridge that gap soon.