Using Flutter Reduces Your App Development Cost

There are two main ways to build mobile apps: native apps, which are built specifically for either iOS or Android, and hybrid apps, which work across both platforms with the same code. Hybrid mobile application frameworks have existed for a long time now, and yet organisations continue to build their products using “native” platform-specific code.?

Developing native codebases means that work is duplicated. If you add a feature on Android for example, you then have to replicate that feature on iOS. You usually need two separate teams of developers; those skilled in Android development (Java/Kotlin) and those skilled in developing for iOS (Swift). This can mean almost double the development time and maintenance cost.

Advocates of building native codebases for Android and iOS often put forward some convincing arguments for that approach. Those arguments can normally be categorised into one of three categories:

• Performance: “Applications are too slow if they’re not native.”
• User Experience: “Hybrid apps feel out of place.”
• Necessity: “We needed to use platform specific features only available to native code.”

But technology moves forward and in 2025 these arguments are starting to look quite dated. At AKQA Leap, we use Flutter for all of our mobile and desktop app development. Flutter is a cross-platform application framework that was released in 2017 which is specifically designed to be performant and feel native.?

What makes Flutter a powerful choice for app development is its cross-platform architecture that allows one team of developers to write a single version of the code and launch it for not only Android and iOS but also Windows, MacOS, Linux and even the Web!

Having a single codebase obviously results in huge savings in development and maintenance costs but also opens the door to other business opportunities and hidden savings.?

The option to deploy an application to the web or Windows store might be a great opportunity to increase your audience for example. If your developers can now build and run your app on their own desktop computer, then they can iterate much faster without needing to test as often on mobile hardware or using emulators. Distributing test builds of your app internally to stakeholders as a website makes it easier to get feedback than requiring them to install it on their phone.

But what about the traditional drawbacks of hybrid development?

Performance

It’s true that no current hybrid framework approaches native on raw performance benchmarks; but unless your application has to render and animate 10s of 1000s of buttons per second you’re unlikely to notice much of a difference in rendering performance between an app written in Flutter and one using the native Android or iOS SDKs. Flutter is easily capable of running traditional mobile applications at 60 frames per second and its architecture means it has greater performance than earlier hybrid frameworks like React Native.

There are a couple of minor caveats to this of course. Flutter apps may take a fraction of a second longer to launch than native, and the memory usage for a Flutter app will be a little more. But these things are unlikely to be noticeable to your customers.?

User Experience

Do Flutter applications “feel native”??

On Android, Google uses Flutter to build applications like Google Earth and Family Link and you would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between those apps and other native Google applications.

On iOS, Flutter ships with iOS-style widgets and integrates seamlessly with things like native text selection menus - ensuring your app looks and feels exactly as you’d expect on iOS.?

And the other big advantage of Flutter is those aren’t the only platforms. Flutter applications also run on desktop platforms like Windows, MacOS and Linux and it ships the kind of widgets that you’d expect on those platforms too (menu bars for example).

Necessity?

There are situations where a hardware feature can only be accessed through native programming languages (Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS). Sometimes third-party code libraries (SDKs) are only distributed for native languages and there’s no equivalent in Flutter? available.?

Dart (the language Flutter is built upon) provides a mechanism to wrap these native SDKs in a “plugin”. What this means in practice is that any required native code is isolated from your main codebase and that particular native functionality can be implemented differently for each platform. This means that your app still remains portable, but you can leverage all the cutting edge native functionality that you need.

Summary

Flutter is a capable and modern app development framework that allows developers to create highly performant, native-feeling applications for multiple platforms. In the best case it can halve the amount of developer time (and cost) that it takes to build and launch a product for Android and iOS. It really is the right time to consider whether building the same application twice for Android and iOS is the best approach for your business going forward. Rebuilding your codebase in Flutter may be more cost effective long term and allow you to iterate on your product faster.

Luke Benstead leads the AKQA Leap Engineering team to architect and build high-quality products for our clients.?

With a BSc in Multimedia Programming and a prize for "Best Interactive Technology Project" at Portsmouth University, he has over 15 years of experience nurturing new developers, championing the use of open and sustainable technologies, and ensuring the delivery of robust and scalable solutions. Proficient in C, C++, Python, Dart, Java, and Ruby, Luke also authored the second edition of “Beginning OpenGL Game Programming” in 2009.

Luke has exceptional leadership and technical capabilities, with a diverse skill set encompassing software architecture, systems design, web development, mobile development, and game development.?

Outside of work, Luke indulges his passion for writing computer games for retro consoles in his spare time.