Transforming Wendy’s Mobile App Experience with Flutter

Navalia partnered with The Wendy’s Company to reimagine their mobile application experience, for its users and developers alike. Using Google’s Flutter framework and Navalia’s expertise, Wendy’s® has achieved a remarkable feat: A rewritten mobile app for iOS and Android with higher conversion rates and 75% faster user interactions than the native predecessor.

The partnership between Navalia and Wendy’s showcases the potential of Flutter as a powerful cross-platform tool. It illustrates how Flutter can simplify the development process, reduce cost, boost testability, and establishes the foundation for global expansion. As a result, Wendy’s is poised to offer a more unified mobile experience to its global customers, faster and more reliably than ever before.

Navalia’s strong focus on delivery and technical excellence, along with their deep understanding of our needs, have been instrumental in this rapid and efficient transformation for our U.S. and Canadian app users. This strategy not only improves maintenance cost challenges but also lays the groundwork for global expansion of our mobile platform Matt Spessard, CIO at Wendy’s.

Flutter is an open-source framework for building natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase. The rapid transformation for Wendy’s has been effective in terms of app quality, with notable improvements in testability and an impressively high code coverage of 99%.

Working hand-in-hand with Wendy’s Product and Engineering teams, Navalia has ensured a seamless integration of Flutter into the existing infrastructure, while focusing on a snappy, more maintainable app with a single codebase that powers both iOS and Android.

With Flutter, we’ve revamped the Wendy’s app making it more responsive, user-friendly and dramatically more testable. Our collaboration with Navalia has been strategic and transformative. We’ve improved our code quality, reliability and, most importantly, our release cadence. Brian Abston, Sr. Director, Digital Technology at Wendy’s

After only six months of development, we launched an internal beta testing phase which has been key to identifying improvements ahead of a full-scale launch. Leveraging advanced monitoring tools and analytics, we gained a comprehensive understanding of the Wendy’s app’s performance in real-world scenarios and optimized user flows. By enhancing Wendy’s mobile observability strategy, we are taking a proactive approach to maintaining the app and addressing any unexpected behavior.

Together with Wendy’s, our team then leveraged an incremental public rollout strategy to a random sample of Wendy’s app users. This measured approach allowed us to continue monitoring the app’s performance, conversion, user engagement, and overall reception in a real-world scenario, providing an opportunity to refine and optimize as needed. It’s a significant step forward in Wendy’s commitment to creating a seamless and engaging mobile experience for its global customer base.

The Navalia team provided outstanding support in migrating Wendy’s mobile app to Flutter. Their dedication to excellence and proficiency in coding has strengthened Wendy’s digital platform, enhancing the user experience significantly. With a solid foundation in place, we eagerly anticipate building upon this groundwork to deliver exceptional experiences that resonate with Wendy’s customers Akhilesh Anakapally, Director, Digital Product Management at Wendy’s

Additional benefits of the Navalia team’s approach with the new Flutter framework include:

Cost Efficiency

Achieving cost efficiency has been a significant benefit of our approach. By utilizing a single codebase with multiplatform support for both iOS and Android, we have been able to accomplish more with a leaner team. Previously, expanding globally would have required doubling or even tripling our team size, but now we can allocate resources as needed while maintaining cost efficiency.

Faster Delivery Speed

With the advantage of working on a single codebase and leveraging the exceptional Developer Experience provided by Flutter, our delivery speed is now 5x to 10x faster than what it used to be.

Consistent User Experience

The app was rearchitected from the ground up. This involved the development of a new UI component library that caters to shared experience elements. Users can now enjoy a more consistent, seamless and snappy app interaction.

At Navalia, we are strategically investing in Flutter as the future of mobile app development. We see it as a framework that not only allows for faster, more cost-effective app development but also results in superior app quality and experience that delight customers. Our collaboration with Wendy’s is just the beginning. We’re betting big on Flutter and are excited to see how it will continue to transform the mobile landscape in the years to come.