Google Pay India Switches to Flutter that will Serve as Global Expansion
Two distinct versions of Google Pay exist today. The first one is aimed at countries where NFC-based payments are widely adopted, while the other is for the Next Billion Users. That latter version of Google Pay (Tez), is getting a Flutter rewrite that will serve as the basis for global expansion.
Flutter is an open-source UI development kit made by Google that allows developers to make their apps using a single code base, and then deploy that to several platforms, like Android, iOS, Windows, and the web. By writing the app in Dart programming language, using Flutter, and deploying it on both Android and iOS, Google says that they can deliver the best-in-class experience on both platforms alike, allowing them to maintain them equally.
As Google Pay India looked at scaling the learning from India to other parts of the world, they wanted to focus on a fast and efficient development environment, which was modern and engaging with the flexibility needed to keep the UI clean. More importantly, one that enabled the developers to write once and be able to deploy to both iOS and Android reaching a wide variety of users. After evaluating various options, it was easy to pick Flutter as the obvious choice.
Three years ago, when Google launched Google Pay India (then called Tez), the vision was to create a simple and secure payment app for everyone in India. They started with the premise of making payments simple and built a user interface that made making payments as easy as starting a conversation. Today users can pay their bills, do online banking, recharge their phones, get loans instantly through banks, buy train tickets, and much more all with one app.
According to the recent Google blog post, the three things that made Flutter their choice are, as mentioned in the post,
- Developers could write once in Dart and deploy on both iOS and Android, which led to a uniform best-in-class experience on both Android and iOS;
- Just-in-Time compiler with hot reload during development enabled rapid iteration on UI which tremendously increases the developer efficiency; and
- Ahead-of-time compilation ensured high performance deployment.
Now the task was to get it done. They started with a small team of three software engineers from both Android and iOS. Those days were focused and intense. To start with they created a vertical slice of the Google Pay app — home page, chat, and payments (with the critical native plugins for payments in India).
Initially, the engineers endowed with this task created a vertical slice of the app and tried to go about using a hybrid approach, which they had to rewrite. During the second trial when Flutter was used, it proved to be an instant hit, especially since the developers could get instant feedback while developing, and it made development easier.
After carefully weighing the risks and trials, in their case for migration, they decided to go all in with Flutter. It was a monumental rewrite of a moving target, and the existing app continues to evolve while they were rewriting features.
After many months of hard work, Google Pay Flutter implementation is now available in open beta version in India and Singapore. Users in India and Singapore can visit the Google Play Store page for Google Pay to opt into the beta program and experience the latest app built on Flutter. Next, they are looking forward to launching Google Pay on Flutter to everyone across the world on iOS and Android.
The Google Pay team recently announced that it selected the Flutter SDK to “drive its global product development.”
As one-app-for-everything, Tez is so successful in India and Asia that Google wants to bring that model around the world.
“We’ve had a lot of traction with our payments product over the past 18 months. We had a tremendously successful launch in India from which we learned a lot of features, and we’re bringing that and revamping our payments products globally. And so I’m excited about that rollout, which is coming up in 2020. I think that will make the experience better.” — Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google
Flutter was announced in its alpha stage in May 2017, we at Aviabird Technologies are one of the earliest adopters of Flutter, experimenting with it since its early release and hence have the expertise in Flutter.
Flutter has also proved to be a revolution in the Mobile application development scene with its intuitive design and cross-platform developmental features. Removing the need for JavaScript bridges for communication and it has become one of the fastest frameworks to be adopted by companies and organizations worldwide.
We at Aviabird are the administrators Flutter Forum, which is among the largest community of Flutter developers with thousands of users. Our strategic, design-driven and deeply collaborative service provision to clients and ship Flutter as the fastest way to ship mobile apps.
We’re excited to see what Google will be coming up with in future. If you’re in India or Singapore, you can check out the app right now by going to the Google Play listing and signing up for the beta program.
