How Are eBay Motors Accelerating With Flutter?

• General

In 2018, the eBay team was tasked with making an app for Android and iOS platforms that offer the facility to buyers and sellers on eBay, and it must be intended for motorists. Also, they were given the self-governance to research, plan, and make the eBay Motors app. It was expected to go from idea to both the app stores in just one year, and it must have the list of capabilities that current eBay clients generally expect from them. Both were scared and energetic by this opportunity, but they needed to stand out on clients’ expectations.

The eBay team had been creating native apps for a long time. They understand what they were able to do and realize that it would be challenging for them, and they should put all their efforts into developing the app. But, it would be almost impossible to make the two separate apps with a small team if they constantly use traditional native development.

However, they had investigated earlier cross-platform SDKs, which had yet to be addressed. But, lucky, one week after its given task, Flutter 1.0 was delivered, and it has been moving towards a cross-platform problem in a promising new manner. The eBay team has been following the events and new arrivals of Flutter app development. Also, they are aware of a technology constantly revolving around us with the latest updates and versions. A primary stable release, Google’s good roadmap, recommended that Flutter can answer for their group to conveniently convey the two stages at the given time. Flutter approaches UI development in a manner that solves many of our issues.

All these things considered that they knew inventing everything with the latest innovation was an unsafe recommendation. However, product manager Richard Spe and designer Thai Dang need the opportunity to create a product vision; hence, they touch slack to assess Flutter if it is a perfect fit. However, they planned to organize team workshops to learn more about the Flutter and Dart languages. They approach this with a good amount of skepticism, and its drawbacks are areas where Flutter may need to meet our requirements. Innovation faces everyone who is having difficulties. 

It saw that Flutter could solve unusual problems faster than he assumed as it would make the user experience consistent between iOS and Android, as the development experience was far more pleasant. Hence, the team wanted to make a high-quality product, and they thought automated testing was a critical need. After working with Flutter, they knew it was the best time to achieve the goals on time.

However, after nineteen months, they were able to meet every deadline. Their first beta was in the CEO’s hands within three months of getting their first item needs, and after a few months, they released the app to the market to the public. They were excited that eBay could stand among the enterprise companies to use Flutter in production apps. Their experience demonstrated that Flutter gives speed and agility, even with the overhead inherent in the enterprise product. The eBay team has worked hard and is dedicated to success. On the way, unexpected benefits continue to pay dividends as it has added new functions to eBay Motors.

One Does Not Simply Accelerate

The first task was to scale and involve the rest of the team. A team was aware that they had to hit the ground that was running once the product needed to start rolling in, as this was the first time anyone had experience with the Dart and Flutter. Everyone is spending time learning the new stack, and it goes via the excellent introductory course at AppBrewery.

Developing a team working agreement was complex, but it was practical learning. As they had to take the two teams with various approaches to solving issues, it brought them together into one cohesive unit. As it was a complex procedure that caused them to put aside many of their beliefs about creating the apps, it made them re-evaluate the value of producing quality software as they had challenging discussions about the design patterns and architecture, automated testing, and the rails, which are essential for them to hurry and innovate. This upfront process was beneficial and valuable. It permits them to start developing an app as one Flutter developer team and gives them a voice in working with the products or items.

When they began creating their app, they were surprised at how much code-sharing Flutter enabled them to achieve. However, a repository consists of the following:

• 98.3% Dart Code (approximate 220k lines of Dart)

• 1.1% Scripts, CI, and various Automation Tools for the app development lifecycle.

• 6% split across, Kotlin, Java, Objective-C, and Swift

A level of cross-platform code shares exceeded their expectations because they only sometimes spend time thinking about or working on specific platform implementation. Rather than that, they concentrate on creating product features. At the initial stage, they expected to jump through hoops as they were required to access the native capabilities. They discovered that it was trivial to implement with the device APIs to enable the usage of a camera, video capture, secure storage, and various device capabilities. A Flutter ecosystem will give excellent plugins for these services. In rare cases, they wrote their plugins to encapsulate the native third-party SDKs. Hence, I approached these tasks with hesitation as they were completed in a few hours.

Although they spent most of their time submerged in Flutter code, they realized the holy grail of cross-platform development: “write once.” It is valid via the entire stack. Everything in the UI was shared, from layout, animation, navigation, and localization. It transferred all business logic, network stack, and domain models. All table stakes, such as analytics, crash logging, and accessibility features, are integrated with the shared code. However, they even got to share the single CI pipeline. Writing the software this way was a massive accelerator, allowing them to make the new functionality quickly.

Flutter app development has benefits that it has the functionality of code sharing, which had an impact on test automation. Flutter has out-of-the-box testing support that exceeds their expectations. It deeply automated the verification of apps, from complex UI interactions to the essential details of the animation. Flutter architecture controls pixels rendered across all the gadgets and platforms, as testing is the first concept in the framework.

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Flutter’s testing support gives a higher goal, and the production code must have 100% coverage of coding. The Flutter framework gave us the confidence to provide the result faster and without fear. Usually, features are built and tested without ever manually testing on the device. As they have so much confidence in the test suite, the quality engineers begin writing production code, and full-time Flutter programmers do it.

The benefits of code sharing are familiar to Flutter, as they argue that Flutter delivers on cross-platform promises to become more successful than its competitors. After doing a survey, the team validated their decision to use Flutter, and its responses showed that most of the team believed in developing the Flutter web apps. Hence, the engineers seem more engaged and more productive in their tasks.

The decision to move quickly on the Flutter is for many reasons, as they worked alongside the Product and Design as a single team, intending to share as they built the single app. The needs for the platforms rarely diverged, and the class of the work managing the platform’s particular backlogs was removed. In many cases, they can replace paper prototypes with functioning prototypes for user testing as there is no requirement to make the unique designs dependent on each platform. Cupertino widgets and Prebuilt Material grant them to prefer the correct defaults and create the customized user experience only when necessary. Sometimes the design becomes iterated in real-time with the hot reload in Flutter, and this specific function allows coders to rapidly code on the running device without changing the running state of the app.

These exciting changes are on the way that gives a great outcome in their development and has increased their confidence. However, the time savings layer on top of each other has allowed them to be fast. For example, previously, they may have been concerned if they rolled out a similar feature in Android and iOS versions of an app and their analytics view that used the quality necessarily on one platform compared to another. Hence, with Flutter, an implementation on iOS and Android is identical. Thus they do not waste time and energy searching for programming errors that do not exist.

Unpredicted Payoffs

The team constantly adds live-chat features, and they believe the account can safely and securely transfer funds to sellers to eBay Motor app development.

In many ways, Flutter has modified and enhanced how a team operates and made its members more productive and happier in their daily tasks and operations. It will serve development teams to view Flutter for production apps of any size with its given speed, quality, and agility.

Conclusion

To put it into a nutshell, after analyzing the usage of Flutter in eBay motors, they say that Flutter is an effective tool for quickly accelerating a mobile app development process in the enterprise industry. Flutter enables developers to build apps that are highly interactive and feature-rich easily. In addition, Flutter permits Bay Motors to publish its apps speedily by providing the product’s user experience faster. By adopting Flutter, eBay Motors has seen increased user satisfaction, high retention rates, and increased engagement. Hence, it indicates that Flutter is the most crucial component for eBay Motors’ success, and its integration will constantly move the company forward with progress. If you want to make your own app, Our custom Mobile application development services, help you to build high-scalable android and ios mobile applications for your business.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. Which platform is used for the Flutter framework?

Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit and a cross-platform framework built by Google. It makes cross-platform apps for iOS, Linux, Android, macOS, Google Fuchsia, Windows, and the web from a single codebase.

2. What type of software does eBay use?

eBay runs on a Java-dependent tech stack. The whole workflow centers around Java and JVM. However, considering the scale of traffic and stability needed by a site such as ebay.com, using proven technology was a great choice. eBay is always open to using the latest and new technologies.

3. Does eBay have analytics?

eBay reports, also known as Listing Analytics, are created for sellers to view the listing’s performance. It gives data on key metrics like rank, impressions, CTR, etc. 

Written by Harshita Luhana

Harshita, a versatile content writer with over three years in the industry, excels in Web Development, Mobile Tech, Healthcare, Travel, Social Media, and E-commerce. Renowned for her clear, engaging style, she transforms complex ideas into compelling narratives, driving engagement and creating impact. Join Harshita's journey through the dynamic world of digital content, where each word and story resonates with depth and creativity.