Opinion
Why consider Flutter for your next app project?
Dave Francis
January 4, 2023
There are all kinds of frameworks out there which you could use for your next app project. Backed and developed by tech giant, Google, Flutter is a major contender.
Let’s see if it’d be a fit for your project. Here’s a quick checklist.
Flutter excels if
You’re a startup or entrepreneur
You want a lowered cost or risk of development
You want a fast turnaround
You want one development team
You want reduced support and maintenance costs
You have plans to also produce a web or desktop app in the future
Flutter is the perfect medium to develop minimum viable product apps - MVPs.
An MVP is a cut-down version of an app with sufficient features to be used by customers, whose feedback allows developers to build more feature-rich versions of the app, all the way to a finished product.
Going down the MVP route minimises risk for an app owner and avoids having to second guess what your customers really need. It’s also an excellent approach if you want to produce an “investment vehicle” for potentially interested investors or stakeholders - a “proof of concept / proof of financial viability” tool.
Flutter excels as a medium for writing MVP apps, having the fastest Time To Market of any app development framework. A feature called “hot reload” means that changes can be quickly made to the code without having to spend hours rebuilding the app itself.
Flutter is modern, logical and easy to develop with, and utilises “cross platform” technology - instead of writing separate Android and iOS apps, developers write one codebase, which produces Android and iOS apps with a similar look and feel.
Not only does this cut down on development time, but it also has the benefit of reducing maintenance and support time as well. There’s only one codebase to look after.
Apps developed using Flutter are 50 - 60% less expensive than separately developed Native apps. With a single development team, you no longer have the headache of trying to coordinate two sets of developers, one for Android and one for iOS.
Another huge advantage of Flutter is that it’s not just limited to producing mobile apps.
With a few changes to the (single) codebase, Flutter also can produce web and desktop apps as well. This cuts down your reliance on multiple software developers, makes for fast and easy multi-platform development, and of course further reduces your support and maintenance headaches. You have one developer for everything.
Really, the only viable alternative to Flutter at the moment is Meta’s React Native.
On GitHub, Flutter has about 35% more GitHub stars than React Native, or, to put it simply, it’s much more popular with the developer community, and much easier to learn than React Native as well.
React Native has also been around for longer than Flutter, but has been eclipsed in popularity over recent years - simply put, Flutter is a better, more featured, better supported and more logical development framework.
React Native was developed from React, which is a JavaScript library originally designed for building Web Pages. Flutter has been specifically designed from first principles as an app design framework.
React Native is more convoluted (and therefore slower) to write than Flutter, is less performant and not as secure. The one use case which makes sense is that React Native is probably worth considering if you have some internal developers who are already experienced in JavaScript.
If you’re planning on having an app built, it pays to choose the right framework from the very start. Here at Foresight, we’re huge Flutter enthusiasts and were one of the first adopters of Google’s revolutionary framework here in the UK.
We’re always happy to chat to prospective clients at any stage in their journey and give them honest expert advice about what we think is the best way forward for their project.
Click the “Get in touch” button below or drop us a mail at hello@foresightmobile.com and we’ll be happy to give you honest, no obligation advice.
