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Flutter

Score8.4 out of 10

84 Reviews and Ratings

What is Flutter?

Flutter is an open-source mobile application development framework created by Google. It is used to develop applications for Android and iOS, as well as being the primary method of creating applications for Google Fuchsia.

Categories & Use Cases

Why you should build your next app in Flutter by Google.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Flutter by Google to build our IoT device support application and many other internal projects. The key point for selecting Flutter by Google is because of its Cross-Platform support. This helps us in keeping a single code base to maintain across Andoid, iOS and Web, instead of hiring and managing separate teams for these. Apart from this clear distinctions, the reason it came out on top for us is because of it's support for native tools. It supports usb serialisation, bluetooth debugging, camera etc far better than other cross-platform dev technologies.

Pros

  • Cross Platform Application Development
  • Better Hardware components Access
  • Very smooth UI, feels close to Native
  • Community Support
  • Better SDK

Cons

  • Debugging can be improved
  • Can be made smoother, especially for iOS
  • Can work on reducing App Size

Return on Investment

  • Quick Development to Production time.
  • Smooth UI experience for customers.
  • Saved a lot in hiring/dev cost

Usability

Alternatives Considered

React Native, Meteor and Ionic

Other Software Used

React Native, Meteor, MongoDB Atlas, Atlassian Bitbucket, Atlassian Jira, Trello, CoPilot, Lumigo, Zoho People Plus, Zoho Recruit, ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude

Single codebase for smooth native like experiences

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Flutter by Google as my primary tool to build android and web applications using a single codebase, eliminating the need to write separate codes for android and ios. The widget based architecture and "Hot Reload" feature allows me to ensure my app maintains a consistent look across different devices or to fix bugs without restarting the app. Along with creating apps, my scope of using Flutter is basically migrating old apps of my clients into Flutter for better performance and easy maintenance.

Pros

  • Flutter draws every pixel itself which enables my app to look exactly the same on Android as well as on iPhone.
  • With the 60 frames per second feature, scrolling, transitions and animations feel smooth.
  • Even with a single codebase, Flutter allows me to switch automatically between styles like a Material design for Android, Cupertino for Apple icons or Cupertino for iOS.
  • Fixing bugs is very much easy with "Hot Reload".

Cons

  • Apps developed by Flutter often consume more RAM because of engine constantly working to render UI, which also results in draining more battery as compared to other native apps.
  • Apps created are larger in size.

Return on Investment

  • Positive Impact: 50% Faster development because of the single code for both iOS and Android.
  • Positive Impact: Easier maintenance
  • Negative Impact: For complex apps, I need to write bridge code which consumes a lot of time.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

React Native

Other Software Used

Android Studio

My first choice for native app development

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Flutter is well known for native app developments. We can easily develop both android and ios as well as web apps using just one source code. We use it to develop our android and ios mobile apps. This saves a huge amount of our time as we do not have to build different codebases to develop apps for major mobile OSs, i.e. android and ios.

Pros

  • Flutter has one of the greatest user interface in world of mobile app development.
  • It offers positive user experience.
  • Flutter has a large knowledge base and various tutorials available.

Cons

  • To use Flutter, we have to learn a new programming language.
  • They could offer more theme options to choose from.

Most Important Features

  • The best thing I like about Flutter is its UI & UX.
  • The next thing is, as it is powered by google, there are regular updates, and it's well documented.

Return on Investment

  • Flutter's native app development helps to save a lot of time and energy.
  • It helps us to reach out users with a better UI/UX.

Alternatives Considered

React Native

Other Software Used

AnyDesk, Google Cloud CDN, Google Cloud DNS

The fifty shades of Flutter

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are utilizing Flutter for the development of a cross-platform app dedicated to scheduling the student courses, timetables, mobile file reader, and simple communication server-client interaction. Also, it is used for the implementation of some specific platform-based application development such as electromagnetic pulse detector for iOS, Android OS and MacOS platforms.

Pros

  • Cross-platform support and development
  • Native Features Access (for instance, reuse of Kotlin and Swift in development)
  • Instant changes in the app
  • Smooth performance, especially for UX

Cons

  • Minimizing the code size (in MBytes), compared to Kotlin and Swift
  • Future support of web apps
  • High entry level - learning Dart language (not very popular one)

Most Important Features

  • Cross-platform support and development
  • Fast deployment of changes made in the app
  • Great UI widgets and built-in tools

Return on Investment

  • It has increased the velocity (in terms of Sprint in Scrum)
  • It has decreased the SDLC time
  • The fast deployment of MVP app allowed to attract seed venture investments in less time than expected

Alternatives Considered

Android Studio

Other Software Used

Android Studio, React Native, Xamarin, NativeScript

A very good, new, performant, and easy to learn framework

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have to be honest, the first time I saw the Flutter syntax I was horrified until I started to try it and wrote a couple of proofs of concept to grasp the basics of the language (Dart) and the framework. Once you start, and after becoming familiar with the weird indentation, the framework proves to be really performant and useful for rapid prototyping of conceptual apps.

Pros

  • Performance
  • Time to market really low
  • Animations are super easy, and very nice
  • A lot of useful and ready to use libraries can be found in dev.pub

Cons

  • Difficult at first
  • Dart is not a commonly used language

Most Important Features

  • New, shiny framework
  • The promise of a framework that lets you write code once and run it everywhere
  • A performant and rapid prototyping tool

Return on Investment

  • It has reduced the development time for mobile proofs of concept

Alternatives Considered

Xamarin and Apache Cordova

Other Software Used

Xamarin, Ionic, Microsoft Visual Studio Code