Glam-up Fashion and Beauty: Mobile App Makeover with a touch called “Flutter”

Background

Techouts is working with one of the finest omni-channel fashion retailers to enhance the experience of its elite shoppers, both online and in-stores. Now, it has stepped ahead to focus on a dedicated segment of the client, a functional part curated for beauty fanatics. While their primary goal is to increase footfall counts and generate promising revenue from the business, ensuring customers have a hassle-free access to all their offered beauty trends and products is another supreme purpose. 

Client’s application is built on Kotlin and Swift, preferred programing languages for android & iOS development. Undoubtedly, it had multiple benefits to support the business goals in every possible way. But implementation of these native approaches posed a few challenges which were addressed and resolved by the tech experts at Techouts.  

Challenges

1. Development Bottlenecks: Any changes or feature modifications became tiresome activities as the implementations were being executed individually for Android & iOS platforms. Along with those synchronizing features, and rolling back changes, fixing the bugs across both the platforms got delayed with the use of traditional programing languages. Such extra efforts increased the overall development time hindering the process of progress.
 
2. Resource Constraints: Resourcing highly skilled professionals, expert in Kotlin and Swift became a tough task; as it increased the operational costs. Managing and maintaining different teams for each platform requires effort in coordination and communication, which became resource intensive. 
3. Component Reusability: The existing native implementation doesn’t support reuse of web components, which are built with React and React Native. It gave a competitive disadvantage to the user experience where the platforms are stuck with a consistent look without being able to share components. 
4. Feature Implementation: Exploring, developing, and implementing new features on native platforms requires significant amount of effort. Writing and testing code for both Kotlin and Swift individually extends development timelines. This ultimately forestalls the innovation and makes it tough to quickly respond to market demands or user feedback.

Solution

To address these challenges, Techouts considered a cross-platform development approach. We brought Flutter into the picture proposing seamless migration of the application from the native approach to flutter tech stack.

• Migrating to Flutter, we could allow development for both Android and iOS applications from a single codebase using Dart. This code-once methodology streamlines the development process, reducing the need for maintaining separate codebases and ensuring consistent functionality across platforms, and reduction in development lifetime. 
• With Flutter, it became easy to develop the application once and deploy it on multiple platforms without requiring individual tech experts. Less operational cost was incurred with a single team expert at cross-platform development in both android & iOS. 
• With extensive library of widgets and customizable UI components in Flutter, creating a consistent and polished look and feel across all platforms became easy. It ensured a consistent user experience across both platforms, irrespective of the device or operating system.
 
• Component reusability is possible across both the platforms allowing flexibility for future expansions and further feature deployments. With this a turnaround with immediate feature deployment & implementations across both the platforms is quick.

By accommodating Flutter into the existing operating system, we planned to strategize the development process with reduced costs, and deliver a consistent, high-quality user experience across all platforms. 

The proposed migration to Flutter enabled our client to overcome current challenges and position efficiently for future growth and innovation. 

Business Benefits

1. Cost Efficiency
• Reduction in development cost and time with one codebase for both Android and iOS 
• Less maintenance cost incurred with unified updates and easy testing
 
2. Faster Time-to-Market 
• Simultaneous launch on both Android and iOS gets all the features rolling in no time, reaching broader audience without any delay.
• Use of Dart programming instead of native, enabled the app development process to run smoother and faster. 
3. Enhanced User Experience
• Promises a uniform user experience across platforms, enhancing user satisfaction and retention. 
• Quick implementation with pre-built components and widgets from the repository.
• Smooth compilation with native ARM code induces the performance giving a near-native experience.
4. Expand Reach & Flexibility
 
• With same time deployment on both Android and iOS, it is easy to reach a larger audience and increase market presence. 
• Adaptation is easy with a flexibility to run on other platforms (like web and desktop) in the future for further expansion.
5. Innovation and Competitive Edge
• With quick development cycle we could enable quick prototyping as well as iteration for new features and ideas.
6. Community and Ecosystem Support
• With the strong and large Flutter community, we could access to libraries, plugins, and support for accelerated development. 
• Continuous updates and improvements from Google make sure of long-term viability and support.
7. Long-Term Sustainability
• The consistent updates and improvements from the Flutter team keep the framework upgraded and updated with advanced technological add-ons. 
• The hassle-free integration with existing native code allows for a smoother migration and hybrid solutions. 
• Detailed analytics with deeper insight help the business to trace out the loopholes in the application for a quick remedial action.
8. Business Agility 
• Flutter helped in making the business more responsive to market demands and user feedback. 
• The scalability ensures an efficient management and maintenance of the application with increase in the user base.

The migration helped the client to accomplish significant goals with fresh technologies as well as enhance user engagement in this topical mobile app market.

With more than a decade of experience as an IT service and solutions industry, Techouts has been assisting multiple clients into versatile domains. With its expertise in technical transitions, we have upgraded ourselves with newer innovations aiming to serve the best to our clients. With Flutter being one of our expertise, we ensure a flawless app development with innovative features, and incredible performance to upgrade your business in no time.

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