Design beautiful apps
What is Flutter?
Flutter is Google’s open-source SDK for creating cross-platform applications. It uses Dart as a programming language, ensuring a single codebase for your project. Introduced by Google in 2017, Flutter has been growing since, attracting a developers’ community and companies interested in rapid development of their apps.
This free toolkit enables software developers to simultaneously build mobile apps for iOS and Android. From a business perspective, Flutter offers the possibility to significantly reduce the development time and cost. This impacts both company’s bottom line and time-to-market for their product.
Companies using Flutter include Alibaba, Tencent, Google, eBay and Square.
Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.
Not only is the application efficient, but also its development takes a short time
- Choosing Flutter for mobile development was considered quite a bold move some time ago.
However, right after finishing my first commercial project in Flutter, it was clear that it was the right choice. Not only is the application efficient, but also its development takes a short time.
Is Flutter the Future of Mobile Development?
Flutter is definitely not the first framework making it easier and less expensive to create cross-platform application. It has, however, some advantage that might change how many developers approach mobile app development.
For Android applications, Flutter can reduce the build time, offering intuitive tools, improving state management, and allowing to follow well known architectures like MVI. If you want your app to run on iOS, developers also don’t have to re-learn how they approach mobile development. Flutter offers equivalents for iOS elements, making it easy to adopt for experienced iOS developers.
In all, Flutter is a way to create apps faster, without extensive trainings, without comprising quality and performance.
When to choose Flutter?
Flutter is a viable choice for cross-platform development for mobile apps. It is easy to setup and uses a single codebase for all devices. Although it Flutter requires getting acquainted with Dart, its syntax is simple and most developers familiar with JavaScript will find it quite easy to adopt.
If you use material design for your project – it’s even better! Remember that it’s a design language also introduced by Google, so these two are definitely a match. This way, you will ensure native performance and responsiveness your app’s content needs.
Compared to React Native, Facebook’s cross-platform framework, Flutter is good for UIs based widget sets, offers good documentation and toolkit, is stable and has a growing community of developers and businesses.
The cost of Flutter app development
Flutter is a free, open-source toolkit. Developing your app with Flutter will require hiring software developers, whether by building your in-house team or investing in software outsourcing. The cost of the latter will depend on the scope of your project and hourly rates of a software development company you choose.
The cost of mobile development usually depends on the type of the project (e.g. game, business, entertainment, etc.), desired platforms, business logic, number of features, integrations, etc.
If you’re not sure about the details of your app architecture, software development team can also help you with this, as well as with choosing the right tech stack for your project.