Being a cross-platform technology, Flutter allows to save time and costs on development and maintenance.
You can hardly imagine a modern life without smartphones today. For this reason, businesses from all walks of life are investing in mobile development to bring their products and services closer to end users. To stay afloat in highly competitive industries, companies have to release and upgrade mobile apps faster than ever. A multitude of both open-source and proprietary instruments are out there to help.
While being a relatively young framework, Flutter is gaining confidence on the market due to its cross-platform capabilities. This article further probes into how popular Flutter is as a technology.
An overview of Flutter
Initially released by Google back in 2017, Flutter is an open-source framework for building mobile, web, and desktop apps. The tool relies on Dart, C, and C++ programming languages. Flutter is cross-platform, meaning businesses can utilize a single codebase to develop systems for different operating systems, platforms, etc.
Primarily, the framework is chosen for mobile development as it offers scalability and appealing user interfaces out of the box. The fact that companies like BMW, eBay, Alibaba Group, and Nubank have all created apps using this technology only serves as testimony to Flutter’s popularity.
The biggest advantage of Flutter, for sure, is its cross-platform nature that allows to build as many apps as needed from a single codebase. This promotes streamlined releases, ease of maintenance, and cost efficiency. In addition, the framework offers numerous instruments, such as plug-ins and widgets, that help to customize a system in accordance with particular needs. A user-friendly interface that can be built with Flutter is also a pretty self-explanatory benefit on the table.
When considering Flutter, one should be aware of potential pitfalls, though. For instance, the learning curve. Engineers may have to specifically learn Dart, which it is relatively unknown compared to other object-oriented languages like Java and C#. Another limitation is the size of the application developed using Flutter, which can sometimes be too large for devices that might have limited storage capacity.
However, there are always ways to mitigate possible issues, while the pros may outweigh the cons in the majority of cases.
Reasons to choose Flutter for mobile development
- The biggest perk Flutter puts on a plate is an ability to build a single cross-platform app for iOS and Android. This cuts development efforts at least by 2x, as well as allows to uniformly release new features regardless of the operating system.
- Next, the framework has the hot reload feature that enables Flutter developers to instantly see the changes in the code without having to recompile.
- With extensive tooling, there is no necessity to look for other third-party solutions and worry about their compatibility across the chosen technology stack.
- An immensely supportive community for Flutter with hundreds of thousands of developers also contribute to the continuous evolution of the framework.
Real-world apps built with Flutter
Flutter has displayed its potential as a technology that is good for building high-load mobile apps for various industries.
In the automotive industry, a good example would be My BMW App that was launched in less than a year thanks to Flutter. BMW experienced issues in closing the gap in terms of features offered by two native apps on iOS and Android. With the framework’s cross-platform capabilities, they were able to save time and resources on the Android team’s expansion and release the app in record time.
In the marketing industry, Flutter served a good job for its inventor—Google. It’s only natural that the company chose proprietary technology to put web-based Google Ads on mobile. Now, marketers can gather and analyze real-time data, as well as develop commercial campaigns on the go.
In electronics, Flutter was utilized by Phillips to build two apps—Hue Sync and Hue Bluetooth. Hue Sync enables users to synchronize in-built TV lighting with the color palette of a video on the screen. In its turn, Hue Bluetooth allows for controlling light intensity, color, and temperature.
In the finance industry, Flutter was employed by Nubank, the biggest online bank in terms of customers. The organization utilized Flutter to meet their goals in terms of scalability and shortened development time. The delivered mobile app addresses the company’s primary issue of shipping new products to a growing customer base.
Needless to say, these are only a few examples of how industry-leading enterprises use Flutter for mobile development.
