Our Experience with Flutter in Tokopedia
Article Summary
F. Dhani Achmad from Tokopedia reveals how they shipped a full event app on iOS and Android in just 3 weeks. After ditching React Native due to performance issues, they gave cross-platform another shot with Flutter.
Tokopedia had previously sunset all React Native code because of poor performance impacts on their most important pages. But facing a 3-week deadline to build the Tokopedia START Summit 2022 app for both platforms, they decided to give cross-platform development another chance with Flutter.
Key Takeaways
- Cross-team collaboration required upfront alignment on git workflows and coding standards
- BLoC state management won out for being extendable, predictable, and familiar
- Final app sizes: 29.5MB on iOS, 7.9MB on Android with no performance degradation
- Build times averaged 1.5 to 2 minutes across platforms
Flutter delivered a production app in under 3 weeks without the performance issues that killed their previous React Native implementation.
About This Article
The iOS, Android, and Web teams at Tokopedia couldn't agree on git workflows and coding standards. Each platform preferred different merge strategies, with some teams using squash and merge while others used merge commits. This made it hard to collaborate on shared code.
F. Dhani Achmad's team set clear expectations upfront about how engineers should work together. They also built in extra communication to catch workflow conflicts early, before they became bigger problems.
With better collaboration practices in place, the team shipped a production-ready event app on both iOS and Android in 3 weeks. They avoided rework delays and kept development smooth across platforms.