BiteHunter 2.0 Makes Finding A Deal On Good Eats Faster and Easier

We’ve written quite a bit about BiteHunter, a mobile app for iPhone that aggregates dining deals in the U.S., since it launched about in 2010. Now, the New York-based company has released version 2.0 of its app and this update makes a good app even better. BiteHunter 2.0 doesn’t just introduce a new, highly visual interface for discovering restaurants with available deals around you, but it also allows you to buy the deal and make a reservation without ever leaving the app.

In total, the app currently gives its users access to about 50,000 deals nationwide. It aggregates these offers from a variety of sources, including Groupon, Restaurant.com, LivingSocial, Yelp Deals and Gilt City.

Its focus on deals, of course, means BiteHunter doesn’t directly compete with Yelp and similar services. Instead, the basic use case for the app is that moment where you quickly want to find a good restaurant without paying too much.

The highlight of this update, beside the new one-click purchase mechanism, is the new interface. It’s highly graphical, makes searching very easy, and lets you quickly see the Yelp rating of every place and the kind of deal you are getting. You can switch back and forth between a photo grid, a list view and a map.

BiteHunter also tuned the app’s recommendation algorithm for this release. Restaurants are now organized according to factors like your distance to the restaurant, the popularity of a given deal and the potential savings.