Why choose Flutter for Mobile App Development?

What are Flutter’s pros & cons in mobile app development? Is Flutter a good idea for every app? In this article, you will find essential information about Flutter for App Owners, Product Owners and everyone who wants to develop a mobile app.

Google I/O 2019 dedicated a lot of attention to Flutter and announced an almost overwhelming amount of news about this technology. Just to name a few of them:

• Google released a preview version of Flutter for the web. It’s not called Hummingbird anymore, now it’s called Flutter web (An example of Flutter Web is New York Times puzzle game)
• Google released Flutter 1.5 with many improvements
• The latest Flutter release adds support for building Chrome OS applications
• Google released Dart 2.3 with new support for UI-as-code features

Tim Sneath, Product Manager of Flutter made an aggregation of all the big news announced for Flutter in I/O 19: A roundup of Flutter news at Google I/O.

At the same time, the rate at which Flutter apps are published on Google Play continues to increase. Flutter is becoming a hot topic and, whether you decide to use it or not, if you want to develop or improve your mobile app, you should be aware of what Flutter is, as well as what pros & risks it carries. Let’s start with the basics.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is Google’s mobile app SDK, complete with a framework, widgets, and tools, that gives developers an easy way to build and deploy visually attractive, fast mobile apps on both Android and iOS platforms (official Flutter website).

Flutter enables a smooth and easy cross-platform mobile app development. You don’t need to develop an iOS and Android app separately. All you need is one codebase for both platforms.

What’s more, Flutter:

• Is free and open source,
• Is based on Dart – a fast, object-oriented programming language which is in itself easy to learn,
• Provide its own widgets, drawn with its own high-performance rendering engine. They are fast, pretty and customizable,
• Thanks to rich widgets, Flutter apps look and feel great (you can create your own custom app design, but also use readily available UI elements following specific platforms’ guidelines).
• The architecture of Flutter is based on the very popular reactive programming of nowadays (the same that React has been made from)
• It’s becoming a serious competitor to React Native, but also to native app development. Read the article Flutter vs React Native – what to choose in 2019?

Let’s go to the pros & cons of Flutter!

Why Flutter? 7 top advantages for mobile App Owners

From the perspective of an App Owner, the crucial advantages are thus: Flutter speeds up the mobile app development process, reduces the cost of app production, and helps your team to build a beautiful app UI with smooth animations. Let’s take a look at it more deeply. We have prepared the below lists for you with Paulina Szklarska and Karol Wrótniak – our Android Developers, who are actively working with Flutter.

1. Faster code writing

For developers, Flutter means faster & more dynamic mobile app development. We can make changes in the code and see them straight away in the app! This is the so-called Hot reload, which usually only takes (milli)seconds and helps teams add features, fix bugs and experiment faster.

Hot reload is also very comfortable in developer-designer cooperation when we want to improve or experiment with an app’s look and check the effects on the spot. In other words, with Flutter, your designer or tester can work together with a developer on the UI, making changes – for example, “Put it 2 pixels right” or “Make the animation faster” – and see them immediately. 

Most types of code changes can be hot reloaded. But there is a list of changes that require a full restart: Hot reload Limitations.

Whereas, in the case of native app development, the project needs to be rebuilt and that takes much more time. You have to wait for every single change – sometimes, even up to several minutes.  

2. One code for 2 platforms

Developers write just one codebase for your 2 apps – covering both Android and iOS platforms. Flutter doesn’t depend on the platform, because it has its own widgets and designs. This means that you have the same app on two platforms. Yet what’s important is that, if you want to differentiate your apps – it’s possible.

3. Less testing

If you have the same app for 2 platforms, it means less testing! The Quality Assurance process can be faster. Because of one codebase, the developers write automatic tests only once. What’s more, Quality Assurance specialists have less work to do, because they have only one app to check. Of course, if your apps have some differences, they need to be tested on both platforms.

4. Faster apps

Flutter apps work in a smooth and fast way, without hanging and cutting while scrolling. If you want to understand why and how it works from the technical point of view, read this article.

5. Designs which your users will love

Flutter is designed to make it easy to create your own widgets or customize the existing widgets. Here you can browse a catalog of Flutter’s widgets and view, for example, Material Design widgets and Cupertino widgets.

6. The same app UI on older devices

Your new app will look the same, even on old versions of Android and iOS systems. There are no additional costs for supporting older devices. Flutter runs on Android Jelly Bean or newer, as well as iOS 8 or newer.

7. Perfect for MVP

Do you need an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for your app to show it to your investors? Flutter will be perfect, especially if you have little time.

If you want to see some apps built with Flutter, check out the Flutter Gallery app, which is a demo of some of Flutter’s features, widgets, and vignettes.

So, What are you waiting for, Hire the best flutter developer and get your MVP ready.