Slickdeals Doubles Releases With Flutter

E-Commerce
Flutter
Dart
Embrace

We helped Slickdeals move its iOS and Android apps onto one Flutter code base, built a Flutter SDK for its monitoring tool with Embrace along the way. Its feature release velocity doubled.

release velocity: 2x
test coverage: ~80%

01The ask

Two native apps, shipping on two different calendars.

Slickdeals has spent more than 20 years as a community of shoppers helping each other find and share deals. It reaches people through its website, a browser extension, and its mobile app, and the app is a primary channel for engagement.

Years of separate development had split the code. iOS moved from C to Swift, Android from Java to Kotlin, and one team almost always shipped an update before the other. Every feature and fix was built twice, on top of years of tech debt.

In their words

“At one point, I asked one of my team members for their opinion on how the integration was going, and they said, ‘I don’t know where our team ends and their team begins.’”

Director of Engineering, Slickdeals Christopher Gulliver

02The pick

A bake-off between React Native and Flutter.

Slickdeals wanted a platform it could sustain for five years or more, and put React Native and Flutter side by side. Flutter won on long-term sustainability, consistent tooling, and an active community.

It chose VGV for the migration because of how we write code, clean, maintainable, and “boring,” with clarity ahead of complexity. The plan was to port features, not code.

03The SDK

Embrace had no Flutter SDK. Three weeks later, a beta.

Slickdeals introduced VGV and Embrace. Embrace built a proof of concept for the SDK, we brought it in line with our best practices, and the new version reached beta in about three weeks.

The SDK tracks page views and moments and kept full visibility into performance, crashes, and user behavior through the migration. Any organization building with Flutter can use it now.

04The migration

Foundations first, then the features on top.

The move started with initialization and core components and grew into full features. Some features stayed native for the moment, wrapped in Flutter. iOS and Android engineers moved to shared workflows, tools, and state management, and automated test coverage for Dart code reached about 80%.

Not every early choice aged well. Wrapping legacy native views got the app out, but the complex native code behind them cost more time than porting would have. More features are still moving to Flutter.

05What changed

Twice the releases, and one team instead of two.

Velocity

Feature releases doubled.

One code base and shared workflows doubled how fast features reach users.
Same day

iOS and Android get updates together.

Users on both platforms now receive features and fixes at the same time.
Visibility

Embrace came along.

A custom Flutter SDK for Embrace kept the team’s view of performance, crashes, and user behavior.
One team

The clever team and the cautious team merged.

Engineers once split by platform now work as one team with shared norms, and keep the strengths of both.

06If you’re next

What we’d tell a team in Slickdeals’ seat.

01
List the tools you can’t lose before you pick a framework. If one has no path to Flutter, build that path first.
02
Port views to Flutter from the start where you can. Wrapping native views saves time on launch day and costs more later, which is the lesson Slickdeals’ own director of engineering shares.
03
Write boring code. Clear patterns and high test coverage keep the tech debt from growing back.