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As Uber Freight marked its second anniversary, we went back to the drawing board to redesign its app. The original carrier app was successful for owner-operators with one or two drivers, but it wasn’t optimized for larger fleets—feedback we were hearing directly from our carrier base. It let carriers find and move freight from point A to point B, but did not support multi-stop loads with multiple pick-ups and drop-offs.

Until very recently, Dropbox had a technical strategy on mobile of sharing code between iOS and Android via C++. The idea behind this strategy was simple—write the code once in C++ instead of twice in Java and Objective C. We adopted this C++ strategy back in 2013, when our mobile engineering team was relatively small and needed to support a fast growing mobile roadmap. We needed to find a way to leverage this small team to quickly ship lots of code on both Android and iOS.

This article is the fifth in a series covering how Uber’s mobile engineering team developed the newest version of our driver app, codenamed Carbon, a core component of our ridesharing business. Among other new features, the app lets our population of over three million driver-partners find fares, get directions, and track their earnings. We began designing the new app in conjunction with feedback from our driver-partners in 2017, and began rolling it out for production in September 2018.

Today, at Flutter Live, we’re announcing Flutter 1.0, the first stable release of Google’s UI toolkit for creating beautiful, native experiences for iOS and Android from a single codebase. Cross-platform mobile development today is full of compromise. Developers are forced to choose between either building the same app multiple times for multiple operating systems, or to accept a lowest common denominator solution that trades native speed and accuracy for portability.