We are building a business in India around all services and products that pet parent needs to make their pet’s life better.

And in this era of being mobile-first, we decided to make our Android & iOS apps the storefronts. And for anyone building a startup today, time is a very crucial resource and thus building two codebases for the Android & iOS apps didn’t make any sense, and thus Flutter came into the picture.

Base Illustration Credits: unDraw

We were playing around with Flutter for a while even before we came up with this idea. But this time we had to take a serious look at things. And Flutter’s showcase page did an excellent job at convincing us that a production app can very well be built using Flutter.

So we started building our frontend with Flutter, and once we passed the learning curve, it became so much fun to work with Flutter. The active and quick support from the community and in some cases, directly from the Google team only made the journey smoother.

We very quickly realised that we need a scalable backend (to handle authentication and business logic), scalable storage (to host files for web and user data) and a database (to store transactional data, inventory data and much more).

But building all this using traditional technology stacks would increase our GTM(Go-To-Market) time exponentially. And thus we went on a hunt for alternative solutions, and Firebase came like a Santa Claus bearing all the gifts.

Christmas came early. Image Source: http://bit.ly/33o7TnI

It offered a realtime database (Cloud Firestore).

An advanced authentication platform (Firebase Authentication).

A web hosting platform (Firebase Hosting).

A file storage platform (Cloud Storage).

A backend logic handling platform (Cloud Functions).

Plus a lot of other things (at the time of writing this article, Firebase has 18 products in its suite).

And digging in we found that Firebase team has built Flutter plugins for almost all of the Firebase products under the FlutterFire project and thus making it our obvious choice for the backend.

That’s us after evaluating Firebase. Image Source: http://bit.ly/37Au6lI

To deep dive, I will now give a brief on how we are using products mentioned above with the relevant screenshots of the apps built solely on nothing else but Flutter :)

Firebase Authentication offers multiple sign-in providers ranging from Email and Phone to Yahoo, and in our case, we chose Google, Facebook and Email.