Why Entrepreneurs Should Care About Flutter
As an entrepreneur you want to get the most out of your development team
while keeping costs to a minimum. For this reason, cross-platform
development continues to be a popular approach. Flutter is a
cross-platform framework that lets developers create applications for iOS,
Android and more from one codebase instead of the traditional approach of
creating separate builds.
Yes, this means you don’t need to hire two development teams to create
separate apps for iOS and Android or have an agency charge you separately
for each platform. Compared to native app development, cross platform
development essentially halves the time and cost to get a multi-platform
app up and running.
Let’s break down some more of Flutter’s advantages:
1. Ability to Go Beyond Mobile
Flutter offers more than app development. As of today, Flutter apps can be
developed to run on iOS, Android, Web, Desktop, Linux and the list keeps
growing! What makes this even more awesome is that in most cases, there
are no adjustments needed in the source code to get a mobile compatible
app running on the web or any other supported platform. So if your
product, like many today, has different user groups that prefer to use the
product on different device types, Flutter offers a no-hassle solution.
For example, with a food delivery app, restaurants are more likely to use
the web version on their in-store desktop, while users are more likely to
place orders on a mobile device. You don’t want to force users to use a
web version and you don’t want to force restaurants to use a mobile
version. Flutter will cover developing both web and mobile versions of the
app with little additional effort and everyone is happy.
2. Ability to Create Stunning Custom, Animated UI
Perhaps the greatest benefit of Flutter is the capacity to achieve almost
any conceivable user interface of any complexity. While a great and
complex UI is certainly achievable in native app development, the effort
required for implementation is orders of magnitudes less with Flutter.
Flutter makes the procedure more adaptable and flexible without adding to
the responsibility. Shared element transitions, shape/colour/shadow
transformation, manipulations, clipping – Flutter permits you to execute
all of these easily. As an entrepreneur this means you don’t have to
settle for a less custom or basic UI to stay within budget. Your app can
have a stunning look and feel, without costing an arm and a leg.
3. Native Like Performance
With all the great benefits of Flutter, you may wonder how it truly stands
up against native applications. The answer is surprisingly well. An
experienced developer would agree that Flutter application execution will
in most cases be indistinguishable from native apps and may even perform
better with complex UI animation.
Why? Unlike most cross-platform frameworks, Flutter doesn’t depend on any
transitional code symbols or reading. A Flutter application is compiled
straight into the machine code, without any bugs that could arise from an
intermediate translation process.
4. All Platforms are Equal
All cross-platform frameworks offer a way to share a codebase between
platforms. Though most frameworks translate that codebase into
platform-specific code meaning the end result on each platform may look,
feel and work differently. Flutter doesn’t require any platform-specific
factors when rendering it’s UI or executing business logic. Using its own
rendering engine and drawing canvas, a Flutter application will look and
behave the same regardless of the platform it is running on. This means
you can be confident that the design, presentation and behaviour of your
application is consistent across all platforms.
5. Utilization of Custom Widgets
Code reuse is huge in Flutter. Developers commonly say ‘everything is a
widget’ expressing the fact that you can make a widget (UI component) once
and reuse it in many places throughout the app. Better still, the widget
will adjust to distinctive resolutions, screens, and platforms depending
on where you place it. You can even wrap one widget inside another,
creating as bespoke an element as you desire. This significantly speeds up
the development time of applications as it reduces the repetitive and
bad-practice task of copy and pasting UI and functionality.
6. Hot-reloading
Imagine getting immediate feedback on every action you took in life. You
eat an apple and you see your skin quality improve, go for a run and
immediately see a noticeable difference in your stamina. Using that
immediate feedback, you would be able to pick your most desirable course
of action very quickly. The same goes for hot-reloading in Flutter. This
handy feature allows developers to see the changes made in their code,
rendered on a real or simulated device immediately, without having to
rerun or recompile the application or lose any stateful data.
In traditional languages used for native development, after a developer
makes a change they have to rerun the app to see it which can take
anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes. Flutter eradicated this waiting
time and the development process is hugely streamlined.
7. Tech Community
There is an amazing society of developers continuously working to improve
the Flutter ecosystem. Flutter was created by tech giant - Google, who
also have a dedicated team releasing successive updates and improvements
to make an already great product do even more for both developers and end
users.
So Why Try Flutter?
The most exceptional benefits of the framework are:
- The application UI and logic doesn’t change between platforms
- Faster code development
- Increased time-to-market speed
- Close to native app performance
- Enormous UI customization potential
- No dependence on platform-specific UI components
We love Flutter at Ingenious App Studios for all the reasons we have outlined above. To date, we have developed and released over 12 applications built with Flutter and are working on manuy more. If you’re considering Flutter for your next project, get in touch with the top Flutter app development agency in town.
