The benefits of using Flutter for mobile development

If you’re looking to build a mobile app, then one of the biggest advantages of using Flutter is that it offers cross-platform development, which enables developers to build attractive and effective apps for iOS and Android using the same code, at lightning speed.

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The subsequent benefit of this is that it saves clients time and money compared to native development (because clients don’t need to use two development teams for each respective platform). While offering exceptionally high quality and capability.  

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Here's a full list of the key benefits, along with a few examples…

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Cross platform

As mentioned, Flutter is a cross-platform technology from Google. A toolkit that allows developers to create applications for Android and iOS from a single source code. (It can also create desktop and web applications too, see below.)

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Fast and dynamic code writing

Typically, iOS and Android developers need to write code then wait for it to compile and be loaded on a device before seeing changes. But with Flutter’s hot reload feature developers can see changes in real-time and easily iterate their apps, making development fast and dynamic.

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Ready-to-use widgets

Flutter offers a large customisable kit of widgets that make it easy to create applications of any complexity. No matter the screen size, the widgets are fast, reliable, and effective. It’s also possible to work with animation and gesture processing too.

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Advanced features

Flutter provides advanced features like GPS coordinates, sensor data collection, permission handling, Bluetooth, credentials, and other features in ready-to-use plugins that are supported by Google.

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Native look and feel

A Flutter application will ultimately be indistinguishable from a native app, as Flutter doesn’t rely on any intermediate code representations or interpretation, compared to it's main competitor React Native.

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Beautiful UI‍

One of the biggest selling points of Flutter is its material design widgets. These widgets give apps a sleek and modern look that will impress users.

Flutter also continuously improves libraries with various interface components. As a result, a small development team can build a beautiful native app on both platforms exceptionally quickly.

Flutter apps perform better

One of the things that sets Flutter apart from other frameworks is its use of the Dart programming language. Dart is a client-optimised language that supports Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation. This means that code can be compiled into native machine code, rather than interpreted by a virtual machine at runtime. This results in faster performance (compared to React Native) and shorter development times.

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Web and desktop too  ‍

From one single codebase, developers can create a solution that not only works on mobile iOS and Android, but also on desktop (Windows, MacOS and Linux) and web applications, so that "everything" can be built using Flutter.

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‍Community support‍

As Flutter is developed by Google, it means that Google consistently supports Flutter developers with updates and issue fixes.

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‍Cost effective‍

For entrepreneurs and companies, being able to build an app cross-platform, quickly, with access to everything their app could need is a dream come true. Flutter is the most cost-effective way to develop an app, without sacrificing any quality whatsoever.  

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‍Quicker to market‍

While there are other cross-platform solutions with similar advantages, Flutter stands out from other frameworks in terms of development time and time to market. Alibaba uses Flutter for their e-commerce sites and said:

“Flutter significantly reduced the time we needed to develop new features from one month down to two weeks.”
Bruce Chen, Senior Development Engineer, Alibaba
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Therefore, Flutter is great for businesses of any size, from Alibaba and BMW and other large brands that use it, to entrepreneurs and start-ups that want to build and launch an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) fast…

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Perfect for a MVP (and beyond)‍

Entrepreneurs looking to create an MVP (to get their new product live, and/or to show to investors) want to develop their app in a way that’s affordable, fast and flexible. This is exactly what Flutter offers, with quick development that can be carried out by a small team or single developer, to create an app that can be available on iOS and Android, with code that can easily be added to for further development and versions going forward.

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‍We can help ‍

We developed Pausetrack - a menopause tracking app - using Flutter. Enabling women to visually track their menopause symptoms and interventions, and do more with their data. Read our recent case study here to find out more.

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Flutter is powerful and reliable, offering vast creative possibilities to build beautiful applications quickly.

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The development process is fast, making it suitable for building quick prototypes and MVPs as well as complex apps and games.

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If you’re interested in developing a mobile app and want to know more, then get in touch by emailing hello@nuom.co.uk and we can help.