Appinio

Appinio is a fast-growing global market research platform operating at scale across multiple regions. Their mobile engineering team delivers production-grade Flutter applications relied upon daily by users and internal stakeholders. To maintain high development velocity without compromising on long-term maintainability, Appinio integrated DCM into its Flutter development workflow.

DCM is now a key part of Appinio’s production app team, improving code consistency, preventing common errors, and significantly reducing manual review overhead for developers.

Challenge

As Appinio’s mobile team expanded, they faced challenges that slowed development or introduced unnecessary risk into the codebase:

• Increasing difficulty maintaining consistent coding patterns across contributors.
• Manual PR reviews required significant time to catch simple problems such as unused files, naming issues, incorrect disposal of controllers, or missing patterns.
• Built-in Dart lints and community linters weren’t strict or deep enough for real production codebases.
• Developers wanted guardrails that prevented regressions without blocking productivity.
• Some legacy code lacked architectural consistency, leading to increased refactoring effort.

"We needed strong linting, something rigid. Manual checks for banned names, unused files, disposing controllers, streams… it’s too much to review every PR manually."

— Mohammed Alfatla, Senior Flutter Developer, Appinio

Appinio needed an automated, scalable, developer-friendly solution that enforced best practices early, before review, before merge, and before production.

Solution

The team adopted DCM for their production Flutter application and integrated it into both local development and CI/CD.

Appinio uses the recommended ruleset, along with several custom rules. The team at Appinio also uses commands such as check-unused-files, check-unused-code, check-parameters, and analyze on every PR to ensure quality and consistency.

Moreover, the DCM baseline keeps the team on top of legacy issues, separate from new code. More importantly, the real-time IDE feedback enforces consistent structure and patterns across all team members, helps them address violations, and, finally, GitHub Actions automation ensures that no PR is merged without passing DCM checks.

Impact

DCM has delivered measurable improvements to Appinio’s codebase and workflow, including faster, smoother PR reviews in which developers no longer waste time on manual comments for unused variables, banned imports, incorrect naming, or lifecycle issues.

Appino sees fewer runtime issues and safer architectural patterns, with DCM rules that prevent memory leaks, unused streams, un-disposed controllers, and deprecated APIs, helping the team maintain a stable app.

Appinio Engineers achieved stronger code consistency and easier onboarding by enforcing consistent order of class members, a build/dispose order, banning unwanted patterns, and keeping every file aligned with conventions, which significantly minimizes unexpected code deviations.

The long-term maintainability of automated guardrails is ensured by Appinio’s baseline-and-gradual rollout of new rules, allowing continuous improvement without blocking development.

Finally, reducing technical debt over time by using commands like check-unused-files and check-unused-code keep the codebase clean and maintainable, even under deadlines, and helped to ship faster with fewer surprises.