Flutter Builds High-Quality Native Apps That Works Different Platforms

In this digital era, modern users mainly prefer mobile apps that are highly responsive, fast performing and appealing to them. They are least interested in mobile apps that are slow and non-emerging. This is one of the reasons, why the mobile app industry is growing continuously and skyrocketing like never seen before. The top mobile app development companies in India working on this platform these days to provide high-quality apps to the users.

According to a report by Statista, the global mobile app revenues amounted to over 365 billion U.S. dollars in the year 2018. In 2023, it is estimated to generate more than 935 billion U.S. dollars in revenues via paid downloads and in-app advertising.

Today, there are dozens of mobile app development platforms available in the market that can help you build some of the best mobile apps. Flutter is among them!

What is Flutter?

Flutter is a cross-platform application development instrument. It combines the ease of development with native performance while maintaining visual consistency across platforms. Flutter is going to make it dominate the cross-platform application development in the upcoming years. The best mobile app development companies are working over this technology these days.

Flutter Advantages

You might assume that every cross-platform framework can perform some things and offers some features essential for the job, and you have a point. Flutter is a bit different from its competitors in some key aspects. Let us take a closer look at what makes Flutter app development better than other frameworks.

1. Same UI and Business Logic in all Platforms

Only experts know the basics of any cross-platform frameworks that provide a way to share codebase with the target platforms. There are no many platforms application frameworks in the market that allow sharing both UI code and UI itself besides Flutter.

Flutter’s way of rendering makes the framework really stand out from the crowd eliminating any worries about the UI consistency on different platforms.

In brief, sharing the UI and business logic, which is possible with Flutter, saves time, effort and the health of the developer while not affecting the performance of the product.

2. Reduced Code Development Time

To build a usual mid-size Android app that takes at least 40 seconds to get shipped onto the test device. Many times, it takes vast time to adjust small visual aspect in the layout. Android Studio has a layout preview for that.’ In addition, it does. Yet, of course, there is a but, the feature is limited and does not always work as expected, especially with custom views.

Flutters have some hot feature that allows seeing the applied changes on the spot without losing the current application state. This exactly means what you make Flutter app development several times faster due to the increase development speed.

Moreover, the Flutter team has put many efforts into a wide variety of ready-to-use widgets. Most of them are customize incredibly that save your time like no other framework before.

In addition to it, Flutter provides a large set of material and Cupertino widgets that perfectly match the behavior of each design language. Altogether, you skip several crazily time-consuming steps in app development when using Flutter, which makes the entire process faster, simpler and less worrisome.

3. Increased Speed

This one is straightforward. Flutter development framework functions quicker than its alternatives. In most cases, you can expect a Flutter app to require at least two times fewer person-hours compared to the same app developed separately for Android and iOS. The main reason is dead simple: you just do not have to write any platform-specific code to achieve the desired visuals in your application. Any 2D-based UI can be implemented in Flutter without interacting with a native application counterpart.

Aside from that, Flutter provides a declarative API for building UI, which, in my experience, noticeably boosts the performance. This is most obvious when it comes to visual adjustments.

4. Similar to Native App Performance

Application performance is crucial for good UX. While it is hard to tell the exact figures, it is safe to say that Flutter application performance in most cases will be indistinguishable from the native app and even better in complex UI animation scenarios.

Why? Contrary to the approach of most cross-platform frameworks, Flutter does not rely on any intermediate code representations or interpretation. Flutter application is built directly into the machine code, which eliminates any performance bugs of the interpretation process.

Eventually, you get your release application fully compiled ahead of time with Flutter.

5. Custom, Animated UI of Any Complexity Available

One of the biggest advantages of Flutter is the ability to customize anything you see on the screen, regardless of how complex it may be. While it is usually possible to do a very custom UI on the native platforms as well, the amount of effort required differs by the order magnitude. However, Flutter makes the process more flexible and versatile without adding to the workload.

Shared element transitions, shape/color/shadow manipulations, clipping, transformations – Flutter allows you to perform all of these effortlessly. Here are some more examples of how it works.

6. The Potential Ability to Go Beyond Mobile

With Flutter, you can go far beyond Flutter app development on mobile. There has also Flutter for Web and Flutter Desktop Embedding’s now. For example, on this year’s I/O conference, Google has presented a technical preview of Flutter Web that makes it possible to run pure Flutter applications in a browser without modifying the source code. This important event marks Flutter’s transition from a cross-platform mobile application framework to a full-blown cross-platform development tool.

7. Simple Platform-Specific Logic Implementation

Besides the UI, many real-life mobile applications rely on advanced OS-level features, such as fetching GPS coordinates, Bluetooth communication, gathering sensors data, permission handling, working with credentials, etc. Many of these are available when developing a Flutter application through a ready-to-use plugin supported by Google.

8. Young Technology

With every new technology comes to a risk that it will evolve in the way we do not want to follow, or maybe, it will be dimmed by the maintainer. The fact that Flutter is sponsored and developed in Google, and they plan to use it in their new OS make this scenario unlikely. Nevertheless, it is good to know about this.

The second thing is, there are fewer Flutter developers on the market than native iOS and Android ones. Personally, though, I would not demonize this point, because experience from 10Clouds shows us that mobile developers are willing to learn Flutter, and learning it turns out to be quite enjoyable.

9. Reduce the Third Parties

When using flutter, you can get complete IOS experience or Android Experience. So they are reducing the Third parties.

10. API

The Flutter API is very consistent. AnimationBuilder, FutureBuilder, StreamBuilder,…Once you understand them you have no limit. Anything is a widget. A button can use as a screen, a full-page used as a button with animation and transformation.

11. The customizable kit of Widgets

Flutter has built with a rich and customizable set of widgets for Android, IOS and Material Design. The collaboration between Flutter and Google’s material design has rendered and easily create powerful UI experience. This helps to create a smooth, crisp and refined app experience as are available with a native app.

Is Flutter a Good Solution From a business point of view?

Some things pose a drastic value for a business. These are the stability of a platform, its performance, a wide talent pool and the guarantee of successful further tech/product development and improvement. The reason is that issues and flaws in a platform or technology in any of the listed aspects provoke the occurrence of risks, along with direct and indirect financial losses for your company.

1. Faster Development

Flutter is a cross-platform development solution so that one codebase could be run on both platforms such as Android and iOS. It will not cut into half, but it is safe to write one code for both the platforms.

No doubt, it will not cut into the half but it is safe to write one codebase for both of the platforms that will take one quarter less than writing separate projects for both platforms. It is also true that our developers think that writing Flutter apps is easier than writing native applications.

2. Simultaneous App Updates on Android and iOS

The same codebase for both platforms allows you to release app updates simultaneously. This one is hard to achieve when there are separate projects for both platforms. Different availability of developers or longer implementation on one platform makes synchronizing difficult. The problem grows when an application update also requires changes in backend infrastructure.

Flutter and other cross-platform tools remove this problem because we make applications for both platforms at the same time. Of course, it is worth remembering that iOS application must pass Apple review each time it is updated.

3. Easy to Maintain

When your apps are ready to publish, you can focus on expanding the user base. This means to move up the app to the maintenance mode, in which fixing bugs is the top priority and adding more features goes on the second task.

On this step, startups often think about creating their own team. With Flutter, it can be easier because you have to hire one developer instead of one for iOS and the other for Android.

4. Future-proof: Instant Fuchsia Support

Google is working on a new operating system called Fuchsia. There is vague info right now what this system can be, but there are speculations that Fuchsia will eventually replace Android. Flutter is a native framework for Fuchsia apps. If you write an application in Flutter, you will be ready to release it on Fuchsia from day zero. This can give your app an early adopter boost.

5. Advanced UI

Flutter reduces all parts of the interface using an internal graphics engine called Skia where the same data is used in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Sublime Text 3. This fast and well-optimized piece of software allows Flutter to behave differently than most of the other mobile development frameworks.

Using Flutter is closer to writing a game. From the operating system, you get a blank canvas, and all UI elements are drawn by application. Flutter team put tremendous work to recreate Material UI components and Apple Design System elements internally.

Of course, you can also make your own components, and this is a point where Flutter will shine. Creating good looking custom UI elements is very easy, and you will have them working on both Android and iOS. This makes a Flutter a perfect choice for apps with advanced, custom UI designs.

6. Easy Adoptions

Flutter layout system and declarative nature of the framework itself and its writing and fitting views are very different from other screen dimensions, which is easier than in iOS SDK. Making animations is also smoother than in native iOS and Android. Moreover, looking at the roadmap of Flutter, we should not wait long for support for desktop and web applications.

7. One UI Designs

If you want an application that looks native on iOS and Android, we probably will not recommend you Flutter. This will be explained in the cons section, but now let us get back to the pros.

With one codebase for both platforms, you will only need one UI design prepared by designers. The cross-platform application usually follows Material Design principles, with only small adjustments for different platforms (which Flutter usually handles by itself) or makes the whole UI look custom, with elements based on the best solutions taken from iOS and Android.

8. Testing by the Experts

Flutter is still relatively new but it already tested in the field by such companies such as Google and Alibaba. Google is a maintainer of Flutter so this may not be an authoritative not authoritative, but Alibaba with over 50 million users or reflect mentioned in the “New Apps We Love” category by Apple gives you the idea that you can trust in Flutter as a technology for your next product.

9. Access to Device Features

One of the main reasons why people should scare of cross-platform solutions to access their native features. After all, that makes your app outstand simple webpage with the usage of camera, GPS or haptic feedback. It could be easier, but of course, you can use these features in Flutter

You have to prepare iOS or/and Android code and send data to Dart by a special mechanism called platform channels. Flutter core team and community prepared channels for most native functionalities of your phones, so you do not have to write them on your own. If you want to use something more unpopular (like a native library), channels are waiting for you.

10. Compiled Code: Stable Performance

Unlike React Native, Native Script or Ionic Flutter code is compiled when the application is built for distribution. It will not require using the JavaScript engine to communicate with native components neither web view to display its content. As mentioned earlier, the Flutter code is drawn on system canvas. This gives the application an additional performance boost.

Will Flutter replace React Native and Xamarin?

The answer is simply not yet.

However, the main question is, should it?

Consider the rate at which the programming habits, it is fair to expect a new Flutter to appear on the horizon in a few years. This does not mean that any older technologies become obsolete, it just give more opportunities and opens new possibilities.

In business, however, the decision whether to use a new tool when there is an old tried and tested one can cost a lot. How to know if you should take this step? We always recommend considering these three factors:

Team

If you have in-house developers, will they gladly learn Dart and embark on creating apps differently than they did before? If you want to hire an outsource team, is there one with Flutter experience? If you are looking to create your own development expertise, is there enough Dart/Flutter talent on the market?

Time-limit

Does your team have time in between their project tasks to learn Dart/Flutter? How time-sensitive is your project?

Scope

How big a project do you have? Is it complex and long-term? Alternatively, is it an MVP that will bring minimum losses in case of failure?

Conclusion

Flutter is one of the latest technologies that is used to build apps these days. It provides high performance, code reuse facility along with many more features. If you are new to the mobile, Flutter gives you a fast, fun and modern way to deliver native apps.

If you are an experienced; mobile developer you can add Flutter to your existing workflow and tools to build new expressive UIs. You are also interested to build your mobile app in Flutter, consult Top mobile app development in India to get excellent solutions.

Flutter Builds High-Quality Native Apps That Works Naturally on Different Platforms