Starbulls App Tech Stack - Flutter, Firebase & Google Cloud

Flutter – The Future Technology for Mobile Apps

After five months of development, the new fan app for Starbulls Rosenheim e.V. is finally finished and published in Apple and Google’s app stores. Together with Andreas Huber from Innsiders Media, we gave the app an extensive redesign and addressed the fans’ wishes. Additionally, we implemented some “playful features” since the app should serve not only as a fan app but also as a Flutter showcase for innFactory. So in addition to the functional requirements, we also implemented many design customizations and animations that currently make the new app unique. In doing so, we completely discarded the old Objective-C and Java code and reprogrammed the app with Flutter and Dart. Although Flutter was not released as a stable version by Google for very long, we were excited about the possibilities from the beginning. We will increasingly rely on Flutter for app development in the future and are curious what Flutter for Web can offer in the future. Due to our extensive experience with React-native, all our web platforms have so far been programmed with React. Thus, React-native was also an alternative choice before development began. However, we did not regret our decision for Flutter and are particularly excited about the possibilities of Flutter for animations and more complex design topics. All our developers who have developed with Flutter are enthusiastic about the technology. Of course, one must admit that there are still some topics that have not been addressed as extensively in Flutter as in other UI frameworks for mobile development. However, we were still able to solve all the points important to us without any problems. We are therefore hosting a meetup about our experiences with Flutter on October 10, 2019 at Stellwerk18. There, listeners will learn about the basics of Flutter and how to set up a CI pipeline to the stores…

The app is very strongly linked with Firebase in Google Cloud, and so almost all content can be exchanged via Firebase Remote Config. Error tracking in the app and user analysis run via Crashlytics and Google Analytics. Photos and content from third-party platforms are either cached via Serverless Functions or provided via Firebase Storage. Since users can receive push notifications in the live ticker or in the background, a Node.JS Docker service also runs in the AWS Cloud. This monitors the necessary changes and sends notifications via Firebase Cloud Messaging to app users as needed. App users can even choose what information they want to receive. At launch, there are push notifications for goals and new news. Within the app, users can follow games in near real-time via a live ticker and always have an overview of what’s happening in the stadium, even at away games.