MVP development is a crucial step in bringing app startup ideas to life. For sports tech startups like 40Love, creating a native mobile experience that supports real-time features and user roles can be a game-changer. In this article, we'll explore how Exline Labs helped 40Love, a UK-based tennis platform, create a cross-platform mobile MVP using Flutter.
The journey began with identifying the limitations of their initial mobile-first web app. While it provided a functional experience, real-time features like live leaderboards and push notifications were restricted or not possible through the browser. As user adoption grew within the tennis community, the need for a dedicated mobile app became clear.
Key challenges included upgrading the experience without slowing momentum, moving from a mobile-first web app to a native mobile experience, supporting real-time updates, enabling push notifications and in-app payments, serving multiple user roles within a single app, and building an MVP that could scale beyond early adoption.
To overcome these challenges, our UX work started by analyzing how users interacted with the mobile web version of the product. We identified where browser-based interactions fell short, particularly around navigation, responsiveness, and real-time feedback. By reviewing comparable sports and tournament apps across app stores, we refined the value proposition of 40Love as a mobile product.
Key UX decisions included clear separation of flows for players, organisers, and coaches, simplified navigation for frequent actions like match tracking and rankings, improved visual clarity for leaderboards and tournament views, and a consistent and familiar interface that reduces learning effort. Clickable prototypes were created to validate flows before development began, allowing refinements early in the process.
For the mobile app's technical foundation, we chose Flutter as our cross-platform MVP framework, allowing a single codebase to support both iOS and Android while maintaining a native feel. Key technical decisions included frontend development with Flutter for consistent performance across platforms, backend integration with Firebase for authentication, Firestore, storage, and real-time data, payments integration with Stripe for secure in-app transactions, and notifications integration with Firebase Messaging and OneSignal.
The result was a cross-platform mobile app MVP that delivered a clear upgrade from the mobile-first web experience. Players can register, track rankings, and follow tournaments in real time, organisers manage matches, scores, and leaderboards directly from the app, and coaches gain better visibility and engagement tools. The app provides a smooth, responsive experience on both iOS and Android, supporting real-time interactions, notifications, and in-app payments.
By leveraging Flutter for cross-platform development and Firebase for backend integration, 40Love's mobile MVP was ready to scale beyond early adoption. This is just one example of how innovative app startup ideas can be brought to life through strategic MVP development.