Whirlpool

Goal

In November 2022, Whirlpool wanted to expand the growth of Compra Certa, their online appliance marketplace in Brazil. While Compra Certa already had a robust and popular e-commerce website, it didn’t yet have a dedicated mobile app. So the Whirlpool team decided to see whether an app channel could help them increase their consumer base and purchase frequency. They engaged Kobe Apps, a mobile app SaaS Platform built in Flutter, to design and build a proof of concept.

Why Flutter?

To save time, Kobe Apps wanted to leverage their existing SaaS e-commerce platform for the Compra Certa app, but needed an efficient way to apply Whirlpool’s branding on multiple platforms. As longtime Firebase users, Kobe Apps was aware of Flutter and interested in its flexible widgets, multi-platform codebase, and portability. After reaching out to the Flutter community online and doing some quick testing, they decided to migrate their existing e-commerce solution to Flutter.

Their solution

Flutter allowed Kobe Apps to leverage native features and integrations of their mobile commerce engine alongside customizations and third-party services where they added value, providing branding and UI consistency across multiple channels, and making it fast and easy to build new features like new cashback and loyalty program features, which have proven to be some of the most important features for the new app.

They found the developer experience with Flutter to be exceptionally positive. The comprehensive documentation allowed the team to get up to speed quickly, while the active community support helped them resolve any issues they encountered.

Flutter’s Hot Reload feature significantly accelerated their development cycle by allowing them to make real-time code changes without restarting the app. Additionally, the extensive widget library helped them create a highly customized and responsive UI in alignment with Whirlpool's branding, allowing the team to create a personalized consumer onboarding journey for Compra Certa users. When combined with a single codebase for both Android and iOS, Kobe Apps found that Flutter reduced their development effort and gave Whirlpool an accelerated time-to-value.

“Flutter's rich set of features and tools made the development process smooth and efficient, enabling us to deliver a high-quality app in a short timeframe.”

- Rodrigo Freitas, CTO and co-founder, Kobe Apps

Results

Leveraging Flutter's extensive library of pre-built widgets and Hot Reload, Kobe App’s platform delivered the first version of the Compra Certa app in just 30 days, with a 92% sharable codebase, a 50% reduction in development costs, and a 35% increase in development speed.

Post-launch, Whirlpool uses insights from Firebase Analytics to improve the app's performance and user engagement, and Firebase Crashlytics to quickly identify and resolve any stability issues. They also use Firebase Remote Config to make dynamic updates to the app's content and features without a full app release, ensuring that they can continuously optimize and enhance the Compra Certa app based on user feedback and needs.