New app tells you how long queues at supermarkets are and if they've run out of stock

With supermarket restrictions (rightly) becoming stricter to protect staff as well as customers, queues have been forming outside stores across the country meaning most don’t know when the best time is to shop and are often forced to add extra time onto any shopping trip.

However, new app Supermarket Check In uses information provided by shoppers to give a clearer picture of how busy all of the major supermarkets – including Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury's – are, and even features information for other high street stores such as Aldi, Lidl and Iceland.

Available on both Google Play and the Apple App Store it’s already proving popular and has been downloaded tens of thousands of times by shoppers across the UK.

Still relatively new, it relies on information that is “socially generated” from the shoppers themselves so theoretically the more people who download it the more accurate the information.

Created by entrepreneur Paul Hulatt, the platform can also check whether the store users select has certain items in stock or not to prevent wasted journeys and lets users know the last time someone checked in at the location was, so they can see how up-to-date the information is.