LEROY MERLIN

LEROY MERLIN is the app people reach for when they are planning home-improvement purchases, from paint and tools to fittings and bigger DIY jobs. By our assessment, its strength is that it brings store stock, product details and project shopping into one place, which is exactly what a hardware chain app should do. The limit is that it is still a retailer app, so its usefulness rises and falls with that chain’s range and with how much planning the user wants to do before going to the shop. In practice it feels more utilitarian than slick, with the focus on finding the right item rather than browsing for fun. Against a general marketplace it is narrower, but that narrowness helps when the job is a bathroom shelf, a drill bit or a run of paint tins. It suits people doing real house and garden projects; casual browsers will find it plain.