Hatay'ı Yaşat

Following the devastating February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey, thousands of local businesses in Hatay relocated to temporary container markets across the region. For residents and relief workers, locating local tradespeople, shops, and essential services became a daily challenge.

To address this need, a small volunteer team created Hatay'ı Yaşat, an open-source mobile application. The project aimed to reconnect residents with relocated businesses, navigate new container markets, and preserve the visual and cultural memory of the city. With no dedicated infrastructure budget, the team needed to build and deploy a reliable, cross-platform solution as quickly as possible.

Optimizing for speed and reliability

Given the urgency on the ground, maintaining two native codebases was not practical for a volunteer group. The team chose Flutter to achieve rapid cross-platform reach from a single codebase without sacrificing performance or UI quality.

Flutter's comprehensive widget catalog and flexible layout engine allowed the team to create an intuitive, accessible interface tailored for diverse users. Pairing Flutter with Firebase provided a complete serverless backend, including Cloud Firestore for real-time data sync, Firebase Storage for merchant photos, and Firebase Cloud Messaging for community alerts. This combination enabled the team to build and launch the first production version on iOS and Android in three months.

Shipping fast and scaling with Flutter

The open-source application is hosted on GitHub and built with a feature-first architecture, which has helped contributors onboard smoothly throughout three years of continuous development. The team leveraged Riverpod with code generation for predictable state management, go_router for declarative navigation, and google_maps_flutter for interactive place discovery.

A core highlight of the application is the merchant self-service flow. Local business owners can register their businesses directly in the app, upload photos, set operating hours, and update their location coordinates. Each application is reviewed by the volunteer team in a lightweight admin panel, typically within three business days, and the owner is notified through Firebase Cloud Messaging the moment it is approved. From then on, every change the owner makes reflects in real time for all users through Cloud Firestore, with no further review cycle, keeping community data accurate as businesses move and reopen.

The app also catalogs the region's temporary container markets, listing the businesses inside each one with directions and one-tap calling, so residents can find a specific trader among dozens of relocated units. Discovery is backed by search, 22 business categories, and district-level filtering.

To foster local connection, the app integrates a community layer: residents share reviews with photos, business owners reply directly, and a shared feed carries local news, events, and neighborhood groups. Firebase Cloud Messaging keeps the community informed when weather or civic alerts affect the region.

The app also features a dedicated history archive, offering historical photographs and information to preserve the cultural identity of Hatay during reconstruction.

"We had three months, no budget, and a rotating group of volunteers. Flutter and Firebase let us ship to both platforms and keep shipping for three years without a backend team."

- Veli Bacık, Project Lead, Hatay'ı Yaşat

Results

Flutter and Firebase enabled Hatay'ı Yaşat to deliver meaningful community impact:

• Rapid deployment: Launched the first production release on both iOS and Android in approximately three months.
• Real community adoption: More than 1,600 business listings have been submitted and approved through the in-app merchant self-service flow, keeping location data current as businesses relocate.
• Strong community trust: Over 5,000 downloads on Google Play with a 5.0 rating across 228 user reviews.
• High developer velocity: Maintained continuous, stable releases over three years from a single codebase, even as volunteer contributors rotated over time.
• Prepared for the future: The unified codebase already supports location-based exploration of the region's landmarks, and provides the foundation to expand to web and desktop.

To explore the source code, visit the Hatay'ı Yaşat repository on GitHub.