Rewriting an app with millions of users: The talabat story
Article Summary
Talabat rewrote their app serving millions of daily users across 8 countries without a big bang migration. Here's how their CTO and engineering team pulled it off with Flutter.
Talabat, MENA's leading on-demand delivery platform, faced the classic mobile engineering problem: duplicate codebases, siloed iOS and Android teams, and inconsistent user experiences. In 2021, they decided to consolidate everything into Flutter, but with millions of users, they couldn't afford downtime or broken features.
Key Takeaways
- Started with static UI and low-traffic screens to prove Flutter viability
- Migrated restaurant menu (critical high-traffic feature) as endurance test
- Used add-to-app approach for incremental, screen-by-screen migration over 3 years
- Release cadence quadrupled after completing migration in 2024
- App start time improved and frozen frame frequency decreased post-migration
Talabat successfully migrated millions of daily users to Flutter by 2024, achieving 4x faster releases and measurably better app performance.
About This Article
Talabat's engineering teams were split by platform, which meant iOS and Android developers were duplicating work, using different conventions, and rarely sharing knowledge with each other.
Talabat adopted Flutter's add-to-app approach to migrate gradually, moving one screen at a time. They started with static UI and low-traffic screens, then moved on to the critical restaurant menu feature.
After completing the migration in 2024, Talabat released updates four times faster, reduced app start interactive time, and decreased frozen frame frequency on both iOS and Android.
