App-in-app builds, from days to under an hour

InvestSuite, from Leuven, builds white-label investment software for banks and other financial institutions, under the bank’s own brand. We worked on the robo-advisor product, in Flutter.

The challenge

Many of InvestSuite’s clients use the robo-advisor as an app-in-app: a Flutter module inside their own app. Flutter supports that, but the documentation is poor and there are few examples. Upgrading or creating a new version for a client was always a hassle, and something always failed. One build took 1 to 2 days.

What we did

We started from scratch and built a full CLI that builds everything for us. Clients also embed the module in React Native apps, so the CLI had to support Flutter app-in-app for React Native too, something we had not seen anyone do before. Along the way we aligned and cleaned up all the platform channels.

The result

A build now takes 30 to 60 minutes instead of 1 to 2 days. Kris Pypen, also a Flutter developer at InvestSuite, later turned the CLI into a real package: flutter_embedding.

Knowledge sharing

Some of InvestSuite’s clients want to continue working on the product themselves. We led the knowledge-sharing programme for the frontend for one of those clients, and put all the knowledge and tools in their hands, so they can maintain the product autonomously.