Mobile app revamp using Flutter in two weeks

Fernando Souto Gonzalez
Google for Developers Europe
3 min readMar 13, 2020

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This is the story of how, in exactly 2 weeks, I made an entire revamp of the CUAC FM app considering that working time was limited to the restrictions of a project developed in my spare time.

Current situation

The situation was as follows.

CUAC FM is a non-profit community media radio station in A Coruña (Galicia, Spain) that had two really different apps created in different years and with two different codebases, which made really difficult to update both separately, so I decided to use the best mobile cross-platform development kit: Flutter.

Android App 2017
iOS App 2018

Radioco

Radioco is a radio management application suitable for community radios that makes easy scheduling, live recording and publishing.

CUAC FM is currently using Radioco as the provider for podcast content generation and program scheduling. If you are interested in this awesome free software please visit the official website in http://radioco.org/es/

The new CUAC FM mobile app is also free software and its called radiocom-flutter. You can find the source code on Github. Feel free to use it and remember: PRs and feedback are welcome !!

Development and scope

The first requirement was that this app should go live in a two-week sprint (the time restriction was very important to reach CUAC FM anniversary) and the initial scope of the app were the following epics:

- Live streaming
- Search podcast content and episode detail
- Streaming of the podcasts
- News reader of the station and news detail
- Additional information of the station, image gallery, contact form, privacy policy, software licenses and links to social media

The development happened very fast and without any complications since the app fits perfectly into what Flutter can give us and I even managed to add push notifications and support for dark mode on both platforms. This is very important because both things were planned to be part of the second release.

The support for dark mode was funny because in Flutter the integration with both platforms is very very easy and I tried to release this because past week WhatsApp announced that they had it and I said: Ok, CUAC FM too.

In Flutter everything is so fast that the iteration on the product is continuous

Screenshots of the app two weeks after

Android and iOS 2020
Android and iOS dark mode 2020

Download links

If you want to try the app, it would be great to hear feedback from you :)

You can try both apps here:

Download in Google Play
Download in Appstore

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