Case Study: Early Market Entry With A Flutter-based Mobile Application

This internal project shows the process of entering the market fast, using the technical capabilities of Flutter to get the required functionality and speed up the development process.

Business goals: Build a customizable cross-platform application with minimum time and effort to test the market

Product: MD Gym, mobile assistant for sportspeople that replaces traditional means of organizing workout and tracking progress

Applied technologies: Flutter, SQLite, UI/UX design and prototyping, push notifications, native plugins, manual testing, Agile management framework

Step 1: Creating a modular scheme of the product

How do you launch a startup project? A good beginning is to create a modular scheme of your future application. MD Gym started with business analysis: marketing research, analysis of competitors, identification of needs, and formation of behavior scenarios. This knowledge helped us create a roadmap for all activities through main product features. Yet it was just the beginning—our application had space for changes and updates in the future.

You may check the modular scheme of MD Gym here.

Nick Reva, Design Team Leader

"Why sports? Well, we support healthy lifestyle—and believe it's a good idea to help sportspeople replace paper notebooks with a customizable next-gen workout app. No distractions, just the essentials: descriptions of exercises, timers, notifications, and convenient possibility to create custom workout programs."

Step 2: Designing a functional prototype

The next step was to form and visualize a functional prototype. It was tested by real users, and a subsequent survey allowed us to check our initial assumptions regarding use scenarios, get a fuller understanding of user needs, and start implementing a product that would meet those needs and successfully pursue our defined business goal. It had to be the first market try, and we introduced some strategic changes to roll out a better product.

Here is the clickable MD Gym prototype for you to check out.

Step 3: Using Flutter to reduce development time by 30%

Entering the market, you have to think of points of difference. Besides UI/UX—which is undoubtedly crucial to the target audience—you have to roll your product out before anyone else does.

With the prototype at hand, our next step was to find a flexible technology basis for the future product. First, it had to provide developers with maximum productivity. Second, we wanted to prevent rewriting everything from scratch in case we have to make changes in design and overall workflow. The solution was found in Flutter, one of the most promising cross-platform frameworks for mobile development. Developed by Google, it allows to build iOS and Android apps from a single codebase with full native performance. Another feature worth mentioning is freedom of design and implementation of custom user interfaces.

Yuriy Luchaninov, Lead Solution Architect

"Single-threaded data flows in a Flutter app allow to use RX in the architecture, which makes it more transparent, simultaneously adding flexibility to development. A unidirectional data flow with predefined responsibilities for each component—Action, BloC, View—allows to implement changes and conduct troubleshooting more effectively."

All of these features give more flexibility than any similar technology. Flutter allowed to save up to 30% development time in comparison with similar cross-platform technologies and native development.

Bonus hint: Speeding up the development process with one-click compilation

When it comes to native apps, you have to spend some time while your project is being compiled into an app, and you can check your latest changes. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Flutter application development has a simplified process of lightning-quick compilation. It basically takes less than 1 second between making changes in the code and watching the results in a compiled app. The inherent flexibility of this technology helps implementation and debugging proceed at an even faster pace—right up to the successful release.

This is how the right choice of a technology helps to enter and test the market with minimum effort and time, laying solid foundation for further evolution of your software product.