talabat

talabat is the leading on-demand delivery platform in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, delivering food, groceries, and essentials to millions of customers across eight countries. As the leading delivery platform in MENA, talabat’s success relies on scale. However, by 2021, siloed native development had created duplicated efforts and inconsistent UI across eight countries. In addition, maintaining separate codebases and design systems resulted in noticeable UI inconsistencies and significant operational overhead.

Why Flutter?

To address these challenges, talabat began evaluating a migration to Flutter. The primary goal was to reduce the complexity of managing two different codebases and teams while maintaining the high performance their users expected. Flutter’s cross-platform capabilities offered a way to unify their engineering efforts without sacrificing the seamless experience required for their millions of customers using various device types. Additionally, the smooth learning curve for Dart and Flutter made it an attractive option for upskilling their existing team of experts.

Their solution: Building with Flutter

For an application of talabat's scale, a "big bang" rewrite was not an option. Instead, they adopted a carefully crafted, incremental migration strategy using Flutter's Add-to-App approach. They began by implementing static UI and low-traffic screens to prove the concept and gain developer buy-in. As a "real endurance test," they migrated the restaurant menu screen—one of the most critical and high-traffic areas of the application.

This incremental success eased internal skepticism and paved the way for a full migration. talabat focused on de-risking the process by migrating screen by screen, relying on the experience gained during the initial implementation. To support this massive shift, they upskilled a team of over 50 engineers who already possessed deep product expertise, ensuring that the migration was led by those who knew the application best.

Key results and business impact

The impact of migrating to Flutter was felt immediately upon completing the transition in 2024. By unifying their development process, talabat achieved remarkable efficiency and performance gains:

• 4x release cadence: Since the migration, talabat's release cadence has increased by 4x, enabling them to ship features and fixes much faster than before.
• Improved app stability: The migration led to a clear improvement in app stability across both iOS and Android.
• Enhanced performance: talabat observed a Faster 'start-to-interactive' times and a significant reduction in frozen frames.
• Successful team transformation: Over 50 native engineers were successfully upskilled to Flutter, breaking down team silos and enabling better collaboration and knowledge sharing.