In 1986, Dixon and McKee (Z Angew Math Mech 66:535–544, 1986) developed a discrete fractional Gronwall inequality, which can be seen as generalization of the classical inequality. However, this generalized inequality its variant (Al-Maskari Karaa in SIAM J Numer Anal 57:1524–1544, 2019) have not been widely applied numerical analysis time-stepping methods for time-fractional evolution equations...