How Nubank, BMW and ByteDance are itnessing 3X growth building scalable app using Flutter. Know benefits of developing scalable app using Flutter framework

1. Build Scalable
App Using
Flutter:
Nubank, BMW
& ByteDance’s
Success Stories
www.bacancytechnology.com

2. Quick Summary:
We already know what Flutter is and how it
is the best framework for cross-platform
mobile app development for all businesses,
especially start-ups. Having established
itself as the most sought-after framework
for mobile app development, Flutter is also
emerging as the most dependable
framework to develop scalable apps.
At a time when enterprises strive to develop
scalable apps using Flutter, it is imperative
to know what it means to have a scalable
app and how Flutter can make a real
difference in developing the one.

3. Why There’s a
Need to Build
Scalable App?

4. At a time when the world is almost
operating digitally, scalable apps are not
luxury but rather should be a way of life for
businesses. The most common
characteristics of a scalable app are:
• Efficient enough to deal with constantly
expanding end users
• Efficient enough to support new features
without any breakdown
• Made of relatively small, independent
packages or modules.
When it comes to developing a mobile app,
consideration of scalable architecture is a
wise business and technological strategy.
Some experts also call it an “insurance policy”
for the app’s code.

5. One of the basic reasons why businesses
need to consider deploying scalable
architecture is its accessibility and
availability. There is hardly any enterprise
in the industry that has not encountered a
breakdown of its app infrastructure with
the exit of just one engineer who had it all
in her head!
Scalable architecture solves this issue of
centralized knowledge and its accessibility
and availability. In scalable architecture,
everything is so well-documented and
easily understood by all the stakeholders
that every team member knows how to
build a new app feature without disrupting
the present infrastructure. Scalable
architecture for developing mobile apps
thus also helps all the teams scale their
knowledge of developing mobile apps.

6. Scalable code developed using scalable
architecture is also a great alternative to
spaghetti code. There are a lot of instances
when the legacy codebase may have got
totally broken while deploying a new code.
Scalable architecture solves this issue like a
champ as it provides enough room to the
developers to add new features to the
application without breaking or disrupting
the entire application.
In scalable code, opening pull requests and
their merging becomes smooth as scalable
architecture is powerful enough to let the
engineers scale new features without any
disruption to the whole.

7. Why You
Should Build
Scalable App
Using Flutter?

8. In the recent past, demand to develop
scalable apps has increased dramatically. In
our previous post, we discussed why choose
Flutter for app development and how it has
revolutionized cross-platform app
development! In our previous post, we
discussed Xianyu- a Chinese multinational
technology company specializing in
eCommerce, retail, Internet, & Technology is
using Flutter.
Let’s understand why you should too choose
Flutter to build a scalable app in detail.
• Flutter framework allows the developers to
create more value and be more creative and
productive in their application development
journey.
• It surely is viable for the long-term as
Google is quite committed to supporting this
platform for the longer run.

9. • Flutter framework is the platform-
agnostic framework. Scalable apps
developed using Flutter work quite well
across Android and iOS.
• While adopting any new technology,
businesses often consider incremental
abstraction costs. Flutter has proved itself
to be a wiser financial decision, too,
compared to other platforms.
• Using Flutter framework also allows
developers to make some significant
changes across the entire code base that can
ultimately support the new components.
• Unit, Integration, and End-to-End tests
can exploit Flutter’s inherent testing
feature. This also eliminates the process of
rendering to the screen.
• Working with Flutter is always a pleasant
experience for developers as it offers
features like hot reload, formal
documentation, and better and stable API.

10. Let us have a look at some of the global
companies that have successfully developed
scalable apps using Flutter.
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scalable app structure in Flutter?
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scalable app that can handle the influx of
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11. Nubank’s
Journey of
Developing
Scalable App
Using Flutter

12. A Brazil-based Nubank is a Neobank and the
largest fintech company in Latin America.
When Nubank became the largest
independent digital bank outside Asia, it
focused on developing other new products
apart from its signature product of credit
cards.
At the beginning of the year 2019, its
business accounts and the lending
department had to choose to develop these
products. At that time, the world of mobile
Technology was inundated with many
technologies and Flutter was still
considered a new arrival. Hence, it was a
tough call to choose from the jungle of so
many technologies.

13. After a lot of contemplation and contention
until the last moment, Nubank decided to
make Flutter as its primary Technology for
mobile development. Since then, Nubank
has been writing all of its features in Flutter.
Nubank indeed calls itself a company that
has a 100% culture of Flutter!
Following are some of the significant
changes that this fintech company
experienced for better after adopting
Flutter:
• Nubank launched Life Insurance within
just three months of adopting Flutter. The
launch of any new product used to take
several months or even a year before
migrating over to Flutter.
• Experimenting with Flutter web resulted
in a better developer experience.

14. • Flutter desktop facilitated the use of an
innovative internal developer tool, allowing
the elimination of emulators, resulting in
reduced laptop battery and faster testing
across the devices.
• Improvement in mobile infrastructure and
development efficiency that resulted in the
innovation of dev-only features during the
year.
• Flutter has an in-built faster learning
curve. Hence, making Flutter its main
Technology has improved the company’s
build time as anyone could learn the
process faster with official documentation.
• The merge success rate became 30% better
in comparison to the native framework as
Flutter PRs took 9.9 minutes to merge over
70.45 minutes of overall average on all the
platforms.

15. How BMW
Developed
Scalable App
Using Flutter

16. In the year of 2018, BMW realized that they
needed a platform that solves the difficult
issue of discrepancies between their iOS
and Android offerings.
It was important for them to develop the
apps that offer the same experience and
functionality to their consumers
irrespective of the mobile operating system
they must be using. It was equally
important to do it without much increase in
the costs or slow down in feature
development velocity.

17. It is against this business challenge that
they decided to use a cross-platform
framework. They undertook a rigorous
evaluation process and designed many
“proofs-of-concept” with all the
frameworks. Interestingly, Flutter did
emerge as the winner, and in October 2019,
a selected group of BMW engineers
prepared the strategy to move ahead with
Flutter.
The strategy included adopting a more
flexible, domain-based organizational
structure that was no longer restricted by a
certain platform. They created a team that
would focus on the connection status and
communication abstraction; another that
would focus on the app’s cross platform
aspect, and others were devoted to creating
new and innovative features for the end-
users.

18. This way, BMW’s developer team started
rewriting all the app variants with a single code
base for their end users that were spread across
45 countries in the world.
It was in July 2020 that the company launched
My BMW App. The app is a universal interface
for consumers spread across 47 countries in five
continents. It provides them a seamless
experience between mobile phones, vehicles,
and the digital world. It is also a direct interface
between the drivers and their vehicles along
with being a direct communication channel
with the company dealers and the brand itself.
In the words of Dr. Nicolai Kraemer, Vice
President Offboard Platform BMW Group: “The
new app platform is built on three pillars: user-
friendliness, safety and reliability. It provides a
consistently designed set of functions spanning
all brands based on feedback and our
customers’ usage behavior.”

19. Following are some of the major business
goals BMW achieved after developing a
scalable app using Flutter:
• A developer-friendly platform
• A developer-scalable and well-functioning
platform
• A platform that provided safe
experimentation and continuous
deployment
• A platform that triggers several apps
builds every day that results in automatic
building, testing, and deployment of 96
variants with each app build.
• As of 2021, more than 10,000 versions of
every app variant
• Ability to move faster and maintain
consistency
• No more dependency on multiple
codebases that ultimately resulted in the
resolution of the problem of feature
disparity.

20. • Single user experience irrespective of the
platforms used to access the app
• Improved user feedback, especially for
Android users.
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21. ByteDance’s
Evolution and
Innovation
Using Flutter

22. ByteDance is also one of the companies that
got benefited immensely from using Flutter.
In the year 2019, the company realized its
need to create a large number of cross-
platform apps. The existing framework was
not serving this purpose as it involved a lot
of time and money.
Having evaluated the functionality of the
Flutter framework, ByteDance came to
know that with Flutter, they would need to
develop each app only once. It eliminated
the need to create different apps for each of
the Android, iOS, and web operating
systems.

23. Also, Flutter’s own rendering engine would
enable their apps to perform consistently
across all the platforms. Also, with Flutter, it
was possible to keep the app’s Android, iOS,
and web versions in sync. This, in turn,
reduced the number of necessary updates
for the app.
All of these features of Flutter inspired
ByteDance to launch their first Flutter-
based education app with an aim to help
children learn to write Chinese characters
with a stroke-tracking feature. The
company exploited SVG formats to create
these strokes.
Now, this Flutter-built feature supports
over 9,000 characters, including most
common characters. It has been running
quite successfully across a variety of
platforms.

24. Following are some of the benefits that
ByteDance experienced after developing a
scalable app using Flutter:
• It witnessed a 33% increase in team
productivity in its flagship apps such as
Xingfuli, Jike, DaliJiaZhang, Xiaohe,
Volcano, and Xigua Video.
• It witnessed a 5% reduction in package
size
• Valuable optimizations to the team and
improved performance
• A team of 700 Flutter developers at
ByteDance, among them 200 are active
Flutter developers
• Extensive use of Flutter for mobile apps
and the apps that run on their web, desktop,
and other embedded platforms.

25. Key Benefits
of Developing
Scalable App
Using Flutter
Framework

26. While we have explored the journey of only
three companies here, giants like Alibaba,
Google Pay, eBay, and many others like
them have successfully adopted Flutter and
made it their main Technology. All of these
companies have reaped tremendous
benefits to developing scalable apps using
Flutter framework.
These benefits can be summarized thus:
• More consistency in product development
• More flexibility to extend and customize
UI components
• Better backend driven tooling in the form
of ‘Flutter hot reload’ feature
• Better support for localization
• Better infrastructure that can help the
business measure observability
• Empowers the developers to correlate
more metrics with other systems

27. • Use of features or packages to measure the
size of the apps
• Sends alerts directly to the concerned
team
• Helps even the non-technical engineers to
become productive within just a few weeks
• Helps standardize code bases smoothly
and efficiently.

28. The Way
Forward with
Flutter in
2022

29. Adopting anything new always comes with its
own sets of challenges, even if it is for the
highest good. It is, therefore, important to make
an informed decision based on specific
requirements and the inherent risks involved in
the process.
Choosing Flutter in 2022 is indeed calling the
shots and will continue to do so even. Nubank is
a good case study on how to migrate to Flutter
or any other new framework for that matter. It
is interesting to note how Nubank had mostly
used its in-house solutions to adapt its build,
testing, and continuous deployment pipelines
to its newly built tools for the application
development process. These tools were like the
CLI and were written in Dart language.
The most important takeaway is to have a
platform team that is totally focused on
supporting the product teams while the
enterprise is migrating to Flutter.

30. It is also important to impart extensive
training to all the stakeholders involved in
developing scalable app using Flutter.
All these measures help prevent bugs and
other complex performance issues when
the existing app undergoes framework
change. An informed decision makes the
journey to build scalable app using Flutter
smooth and helps simplify the entire
product ecosystem.

31. Thank You
www.bacancytechnology.com