Flutter has quickly grown in demand over the years. In fact, it is the most preferred framework in cross-platform mobile app development, with 46% of global developers using it in 2022. It has won the Flutter vs React Native debate, surpassing it in 2021 to become the framework of choice worldwide.
Flutter has a fast-growing community and offers several benefits to large-scale businesses. You should consider investing in this framework if you want a fast, high-performing app. Cross-platform frameworks like Flutter can make your app work on different devices and platforms.
What Is Flutter?
Flutter is Google’s free, open-source Software Development Kit for building cross-platform apps. It creates and deploys visually intuitive applications. There are over 450,000 Flutter apps on the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store combined at present.
Flutter app development is a feature-packed framework. These include fast performance, advanced UI, routing mechanisms, federated plugin support, etc. This framework is therefore, the choice of startups and business owners.
Flutter is also a flexible cross-platform framework that controls every pixel for creating customized mobile app design that fit on any mobile screen.
Why Should You Choose Flutter for Your App Development?
Increases Native App Efficiency
The single codebase is the first feature that makes Flutter the preferred choice of many business owners. Other than this, Flutter developers can easily integrate platform-specific functionalities and APIs into their apps. This capability makes Flutter platform independent.
Uses Hot Reload
The Flutter app framework is right for business owners who want fast app development and updates. Flutter’s Hot Reload feature also speeds up app development, as developers can change the code and see them immediately without hampering the app’s current state. Bug fixing becomes a breeze, as does workflow management.
Cost-Effective
Flutter is an open-source framework that is scalable, free to use, and publicly accessible. Business owners only have to spend money to hire a Flutter development agency. This framework is extremely efficient and offers several pre-built templates. Thanks to all its unique, freely available features, developers can also make new ones without much effort.
Put simply, Flutter significantly impacts app development costs because of free access to multiple third-party packages. These boost developer efficiencies and reduce development costs.
Better UX with High-Quality Widgets
App development with Flutter is also gaining market popularity because of seamless UI/UX features and robust design elements. It uses ready-made widgets for developing mobile applications using a uniform object model.
According to Google and Apple’s material design guidelines, these are carefully designed, pre-built widgets. As a result, the Flutter widgets library helps create fantastic UI and personalized designs without affecting app performance.
An excellent choice for MVP development
Flutter is recommended for Minimum Viable Product (MVP) development for all the above reasons. It is excellent for MVP development because of its scalability as well.
Building an MVP with Flutter helps introduce the basic app vision. It encourages feedback and enables market research on the offered features. MVP app development using Flutter is also useful because it enables direct integration with Firebase and supports several IDEs.
Top 5 Flutter-based Apps
The apps mentioned below have gained popularity due to their implementation of Flutter technologies:
Google Ads
Google Ads is one of the best examples of Flutter mobile applications. As the term suggests, Google Ads is an online platform where business owners (like you) can market their services to lure more customers. This application was built on Flutter, making it highly intuitive with a pleasing interface.
Xianyu by Alibaba
Alibaba’s cross-platform app, Xianyu, impresses users with its attractive UI/UX and quick and easy transactions. China’s largest second-hand marketplace allows customers to buy products globally. This app is quite popular in the eCommerce sector, and it turned to Flutter to provide consistent performance across platforms, outstanding graphics, and quick loading times.
Reflectly
Reflectly is a journal and mood tracker app that delivers customized motivation sessions and encourages users to use them. Initially, Reflectly was built on React Native, but now it has shifted to the Flutter framework. Its integration delivered a high-performance application with real-time updates and valuable insights, giving it the upper hand once again in the seemingly endless Flutter vs React Native debate.
Philips Hue
Philips Hue is a well-known smart home lighting system. Its two applications, Hue Bluetooth and Hue Sync, are built on Flutter. The app lets users control their Hue devices, like color changing, with a single tap on the screen. It also lets users synchronize lights with their media units.
The New York Times
Apps like The New York Times also leverage cross-platform mobile app development. As an example, the KenKen puzzle is available for mobile devices. The Flutter integration helps puzzles progress through different stages to be solved quickly.
What the Flutter App Development Process Looks Like
Understanding how development takes place will help you judge whether you’re selecting the right Flutter app developer.
Define Your App
Your app’s success depends on the features you’re adding and how they work together to deliver an excellent user experience (UX). Thus, defining the app’s vision and objectives is imperative.
Once you determine your app’s actual goals, vision, and purpose, the app development agency can incorporate features accordingly.
Tick-mark all the following questions once you’re done defining them.
What are your expectations of the Flutter app?
Which technology will you use to develop a high-performing app?
What budget have you set for app development?
Conduct Market Research
After determining your app idea, move ahead with market research to get insights into ongoing market trends, your targeted audience’s preferences, and competitors.
Conducting market research helps you identify your competitor’s weaknesses so that you can address them in your app with a well-planned strategy.
Aim to find the following answers while researching the market:
Is your app really needed?
Who is your targeted audience?
What’s the competition like? How can you outperform them?
Do you have a marketing and monetization plan for your app?
Work on UI/UX Design
Wireframing or creating conceptual layouts of the app is the next step in the Flutter app development process. The team begins by creating app structure and flow on a whiteboard or paper. These are modified and finalized before moving on to the User Interface and User Experience design.
The UI/UX design provides developers with the blueprint and visual direction regarding the app’s look, feel, and flow.
Start the App Development Process
You can begin the app development process by picking a suitable platform that meets your business requirements and expectations. This is when developers add the features decided according to your intended users’ needs.
Three elements are essential to development: the front end, API, and back end.
All the components of your application that you see and interact with are the front end. It’s the side users interact with and is hence called the client side.
Application programming interfaces (APIs) link the application and the back end to the server.
The back end collects and stores all data to ensure smooth operation. It communicates with the server, which is why it is known as the server side.
Test and Debug
You are one step closer to releasing your app, but it must still be thoroughly tested for bugs. The quality assurance (QA) team will be responsible for this and, in part, for delivering a smooth, error-free user experience. Mobile App testing assures reliability, scalability, security, and usability.
There are 3 major testing processes available in Flutter app development:
Unit testing: Code accuracy is tested in unit testing without returning to the actual environment.
Widget testing: This form of testing ensures the widgets are created correctly.
Integration testing: Integration testing is a mixture of unit testing, widget testing, and the application’s outer components.
Deploy the App on App Stores
Now that your app is ready, you can submit it. The deployment of an app involves two main components. The first step is deploying your web server (API) into a scalable production environment. The app must then be configured to use the production environment.
Finally, the app must be tested to ensure it functions correctly in the production environment. Once sorted out, you can submit it to Google Play and Apple App Stores.
What Is the Cost of Flutter App Development?
There is no definite answer because Flutter app development costs depend on various factors, and which mobile app development company you hire. Here is a list on what majorly affects them:
App features complexity
The primary factor affecting Flutter-based applications is feature complexity. Integrating basic app features requires minimal efforts that lead to minimal development expenses.
App categorization
The elements you focus on will impact the final Flutter mobile app development cost. Following are the app categorization points to consider:
⇾ What is the purpose of your application?
⇾ What features do you want in your app?
⇾ How large will your app’s user base be?
App UI/UX design
UI design, app size, animations, graphics, and interactivity heavily influence App UI/UX design Flutter app development costs. For instance, an app with several animated sections or colorful images will cost less than one with fewer interactive elements and animations.
Functions and integrations
The standard integrations that impact the Flutter application development cost are – AR navigation, 3D modeling, AI chatbots, push notifications, social integrations, etc.
Support & Maintenance
This is the last, but certainly, not the least, influential factor affecting your budget. Apps cannot be sustained without Flutter maintenance and support services, dramatically impacting mobile app development costs.
In short, your app could cost between 20,000 and $150,000. It could fall under one of these categories based on the factors above:
Simple App: $20,000–$50,000
Medium-Complexity App: $55,000–$80,000
High-Complexity App: $85,000–$150,000
You may request our no-obligation Flutter consulting services to know how much it’ll cost to hire a Flutter app developer.
Final Thoughts
If you want to make your app unique and stand out in a competitive market, you must ensure it has extraordinary features to attract a sizable audience.
The Flutter mobile framework is ideal for business owners building user-friendly and highly interactive apps across multiple platforms. Flutter is the right pick if you want a smooth UI, plus this framework saves time and money as it has a single codebase.
FAQs
What is Flutter?
Flutter is a free and open-source cross-platform mobile app development framework introduced by Google in 2015.
What kinds of apps is it useful for?
Flutter is commonly used for mobile apps that need to work on both iOS and Android. It is also recommended for web or desktop-based interactive apps because it helps create pixel-perfect experiences.
Does it perform as well as a Native app?
Flutter apps have been known to deliver high performance comparable to native apps. That’s because it uses native components and an excellent rendering engine for smooth results.
Is Flutter used only for mobile app development?
No, Flutter applications run on web and desktop as well.
Can I use Flutter for existing projects or only for new ones?
Flutter can be a good choice for existing and new projects. For existing apps, the developers gradually introduce Flutter into the app’s codebase or use it for specific features within your app.
