Now, the world has recognized mobile apps as the most powerful tool for businesses to interact with the potential, mass, and targeted audience. So it doesn’t matter whether you are running a small business or an established one, it is important to have a mobile presence in this digital era.
No one can deny that mobile apps have become an integral part of our daily lives and SMEs, as well as for large enterprises. These apps not only increase your customer retention rate and help you to serve them with some personalized experience. And unarguably, if you are in business with a functional and intuitive app, your services and products are more likely to get recognized among many.
So, every business needs an app to thrive in this competitive era. Now the question arises here is which app type is more suitable for you. Whether to go with the native app or with the cross-platform is a difficult choice to make.
If you look at the current trends, then Cross-platform development has become quite popular among developers and businesses. Going by the functionality, then Cross-Platform App
Development is a single way of creating interactive mobile applications that can be run on multiple platforms with equal efficiency. One of the significant benefits of developing a cross-platform app is it reduces the development cost.
In this write-up, we will share what is Flutter and how it makes your project cost-efficient.
Same UI and Business Logic in All Platforms
As we know that any cross-platform framework provides a way to share codebase between the target platforms. But if you look at the other frameworks, then there is no other framework than Flutter which share both the UI code and UI itself.
Relying on any platform-specific components for the rendering process paves the way for the need for a property mapping layer for the platform widget and a framework widget data synchronization. So it requires mapping every animation into a platform-specific widget call. And it is very complicated. On the other hand, Flutter doesn’t need any platform-specific UI components to render its UI.
Increased Time-to-Market Speed
This one is very straightforward. Development through the Flutter framework functions away quicker than its alternatives. If we want to compare it in hours, then it would take at least two times fewer man-hours compared to the app developed separately for Android and iOS.
The prime reason behind this is pretty simple. A developer doesn’t have to write any
platform-specific code to achieve the desired visuals and functionality for the app For instance, any 2D-based UI can be implemented in Flutter without interacting with a native application counterpart.
Furthermore, Flutter provides a declarative API for building UI, which in turn, boosts the app performance. This is most obvious when it comes to visual adjustments.
Similar to Native App Performance
Application performance is crucial for good UX. While it’s hard to tell the exact figures, it’s 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 doesn’t rely on any intermediate code representations or interpretation. Flutter application development 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.
Custom, Animated UI of Any Complexity Available
One of the biggest attributes of Flutter is its ability to customize anything the users witness on the screen, irrespective of how complex it may be. It’s generally possible to do a very custom UI on the native platforms as well, the amount of effort required differs by the order of magnitude.
However, Flutter is known for making the process more flexible and versatile and removes extra workload. Shared element transitions, shape/color/shadow manipulations, clipping, transformations – Flutter empowers developers to perform all of these effortlessly.
Own Rendering Engine
The framework empowers you to do so much stuff with your apps that you can’t get on other platforms. It requires the framework to be very flexible and mighty. Most of the points presented above wouldn’t be possible if not handled with a high-performance cross-platform rendering engine.
For your info, Flutter uses Skia for rendering itself onto a platform-provided canvas. Because of this engine, UI built-in Flutter can be launched on virtually any platform. Putting it in other words, you don’t have to adjust the UI to transfer it to a platform, which simplifies the development process hugely.
Simple Platform-Specific Logic Implementation
Besides the UI, many real-life mobile apps depend on advanced OS-level features, such as fetching GPS coordinates, Bluetooth communication, gathering sensor data, permission handling, working with credentials, etc. Most of these are available when developing a Flutter application through a ready-to-use plugin supported by Google.
Well, there are many cases of your application relying on an OS-level feature which is not yet
available as a plugin. But the team has you covered here as well. Flutter provides a way to establish efficient communication between platform-native code and Dart through platform channels.
By following this way, you can implement anything that a native app can do on a Flutter app, with just a little extra effort on the native side.
The Potential Ability to Go Beyond Mobile
By using Flutter, a developer can go beyond the Flutter app development on mobile. You can use Flutter for Web and Flutter Desktop Embeddings. For instance, last year’s I/O conference, Google presented a technical preview of Flutter Web that makes it possible to run pure Flutter applications in a browser, even without any modifications in source code.
Another important update from this event was Flutter’s transition from a cross-platform mobile application framework to a full-blown cross-platform development tool.
Reusability Codebase
With Flutter Framework, developers can write the code only once and can use the same system on multiple platforms to build different applications. As a result, it shortens the time to write code so that apps can run with equal efficiency on multiple platforms. If you don’t know, Ninety percent of the code can be reused if you go with the Flutter framework. It saves significant time, effort, savings, and eventually, the entire cost of app development.
Open-source and a great community
As you know, Flutter is an open-source framework, it means it is free to use, and you don’t need to pay anything to use any of its features. Here, the only investment that an organization needs to make is to explore the good talent and hire them as app developers that can work using Flutter and develop a fully-functional, feature-rich, beautiful app.
Faster development with Hot-Reloading
Hot-Reloading is ultimately a time-saving feature that empowers the developer to see the output directly and improve the performance of the application in terms of the execution. Plus, the development team can add a new feature, fix bugs, and experiment with new things during the development time. As a result of this, it reduces the overall development time and increases the chances of releasing the app before the defined timeline. Well, as the size of the application increases, Flutter app developers need to reconsider the effective use of this feature.
MVP Development
Today, there are hundreds of startups and small businesses thriving in the market that are trying hard to convince investors for funding. But, it will be challenging to convince investors anyway. So to convince the investors, one has to create an MVP that can work on different platforms so that you can show its applicability. You can easily do it by relying on Flutter. You can make your MVP in Flutter and your development time and the entire cost.
To add in this, you can use the MVP to build your product since the written code is of high quality and can be reused.
However, everything except the mobile part of the framework is not yet considered production-ready or for the usage of developers. But since it has a large community and support from Google, an experienced Flutter developer can make a pure Flutter app run on any major platform today, including Android, iOS, Web browser, Windows, macOS, Linux, and even embedded devices. And the app will function properly with no changes to Dart code.
