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Run a quick Google search for ‘Flutter,’ and here’s what you’re going to get — “Create native apps in record time.” Well, isn’t that music to the ears of every startup founder? Flutter for MVP production should be the first choice for startups that are short on time but high on ambition to release their mobile app quickly.

What Is Flutter?

Flutter is a package for the development of open-source UI apps that Google is bringing to the world. If you want to develop Android, iOS, or even desktop platforms like Windows, Linux, Google Fuchsia, or web-based mobile apps, Flutter makes it easy, and stylish.

What Makes Flutter A Good Startup Choice? 

There are three reasons why this is ideal: 

• Fast Creation 
• User-Friendly Interface 
• Native Performance

Fast Creation

Flutter makes the work of a developer easier with the functionality of hot reloading. The app helps to create UIs, patch bugs quicker, and play with new application add-ons — all on Android & iOS simulators and hardware.

User-Friendly Interface

Flutter carries on what is known to Google, expressive, and versatile UIs that improve the experience of the customer. Flutter has its built-in Content Design and Cupertino widgets, as well as automatic natural scrolling animations, rich motion APIs, etc.

Native Performance

Android & iOS are seeing very different users. Most mobile application development frameworks undermine the performance of the native device, thereby compromising the user experience of the application. Flutter ensures full integration of all native app output components, such as scrolling, fonts, navigation, and even the use of icons.

Is Flutter A Good Choice For Mobile App Development?

The design of Minimum Viable Products helps to build a simple and functional version of a product concept. Imagine it is a no-frills version of the intended product produced to test its economic viability and business viability. The least amount of resources — capital and labor — is being placed into the creation of Start-up MVP. Consequently, it is also projected to take much less time than a full-fledged product or software development.

Benefits of MVP

MVP development has other advantages such as: attracting early adopters for product testing, validated learning — helps to understand the consumer needs, Resource-friendly — saves time, labor & money, and minimal errors in final product production. Many global brands that we know today have to scale their revenues with the aid of MVP production. 

MVP implementation needs to happen at a rapid pace in the startup world. At the same time, it also has to make the MVP presentable. Most of all, it is focused on the success of the MVP that the creators of startups will be able to raise more funds to move the company forward.

With these standards in mind, Flutter offers many advantages that can help create the perfect mobile device. With all that said, its time to immerse yourself in the technical aspect of why Flutter should be your first choice for MVP growth. Let us continue taking a look:

Helps Build Multiple Apps In One Single Frame

Whether its online, portable, Ios, Browser, iOS, etc., Flutter lets you create a framework or function applications. In other words, you just need one platform for creating apps to bring your ideas to life on multiple platforms. To put it another way, Flutter is a cost-effective means of developing applications for various channels. When one Flutter professional or team is enough to create multiple applications, there’s no need to involve several specialists or teams. Isn’t that what all founders of startups yearn for?

React Inspired Modern Framework

React is a JavaScript library which has a large pool of developers. It’s easy to find developers who can code and build on React applications. Flutter comes with a new, React driven system. Developers may opt to use the framework to its full extent or use only parts of it required for their app. Rest assured, finding developers for your Flutter software project won’t face any difficulty.

Top-Notch App Performance

Apps produced using Flutter offer top-notch efficiency. Since these apps run via natively compiled interpreters without any intervention, they start fast and also maintain a constant speed of 60fps. An MVP developed using Flutter will run at speeds equal to full-fledged products for a startup.

How can one distribute Flutter based apps? Flutter lets you promote your apps on various channels, including Google Play, Search, Gmail, YouTube, and the Google Display Network, which is constantly growing. In reality, when you spend $25 on app promotions, you can receive a $75 credit.

Non-Stop Improvement

Flutter provides a versatile framework for creating software. It has a dedicated part widget engine and UI that resembles native platforms. These widgets are also adaptable for modification and are designed aesthetically. You can create a simple version of the app and make continuous changes to match your requirements in app design.

Super Active Community

Support is never hard to find when creating an app with a Flutter. The super-active community of Flutter is involved with contributors from inside and outside Google. The group is spread across several channels, including Github to collect tickets, Meetup to find the next event near you, or participate in Q&A conversations in Stack Overflow, Twitter, Slack, YouTube, and many other online media.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly About Flutter: Flutter Review

It’s an open-source software development kit (SDK), built by Google, to build iOS and Android apps quickly and share much of the code. It works in tandem with the Android and iOS SDKs, which also means that you do need a macOS machine for iOS (like React Native and Xamarin) to build. To us, the Android installation was very smooth — we just followed the website instructions and used the ‘flutter doctor’ button, but we initially had some problems with the iOS setup.

There are also pros and cons to the fact that Flutter does its UI drawing rather than being a wrapper around the platform-specific native components. The advantage is that if, for example, anything is made on your iPhone test with iOS 12, it should be made the same way, not only on any other iOS edition but on any Android phone as well. With Respond Native or Xamarin, the UI components have a variety of properties that are supported only on one platform or the other, or maybe they are supported but converted into their native counterparts behind the scenes in a slightly different way.

It means either you need to check on a lot of devices and OS versions (and possibly write new application code to address specific situations), or you just need to know it could look broken (or at least different) to some users. If you use an attribute or a function that is not supported on a particular version of the OS, your device could even crash. You’ll be much safer with Flutter (at least for the App’s UI part). You should always test the app on multiple devices, mainly if you are using third-party plugins that map to underlying native components unique to the platform.

Hot reloading is just too good, it’s the vision of a developer come true: + S in the editor and reload the game into the sim in a sec! Goodbye to the interminable phase of build / wait / run / wait / test / start-over. When you change assets and plugins, you will need to reconstruct something in the navigation, state initialization, or logic. Still, most changes to the UI will be implemented immediately while the app is running. It is where you’d devote much of your time to apps that are UI-heavy.

The Not So Good News About Flutter Review

As already stated a couple of times, it does not build native components; Flutter paints the UI in its customary way. It does an excellent job replicating the Material Design of Android and even iOS-specific components with its Cupertino library, but under the hood, it is not yet native. That has a couple of consequences, like:

If iOS 13 has modified the way a segmented control or UISwitch is made, then your Flutter app that uses Cupertino Segmented Control or Cupertino Switch will retain the old look until you upgrade and restore it. You might say that other users wouldn’t care (most of my non-tech friends wouldn’t care and wouldn’t even notice, for example, they’d only care if the app looks pretty good enough rather than if it’s 100% compatible with the classic look and feel of the OS), but if you’re a purist, it might be a deal-breaker.

Flutter Usage: Things You Must Know About Flutter Mobile App Development

These days, Flutter is generating headlines in the mobile development room. Its success can be measured by the fact that it is not in its stable release yet but has already been embraced by some of the most prominent companies, such as Alibaba, Google Advertising, Birch Finance, Device Tree, Hamilton Musical, and many more.

And as more and more businesses are fluttering, the job market has also seen an increase. Every day more and more jobs are being posted for the flutter growth. Startups that once had an enthusiasm for React Native are now tingling with flutter, and rightly so.

Flutter Mobile App Development Is Not A Language

Flutter is not a language but an SDK, much like Android SDK. Java / Kotlin are the programming languages for android development, and DART is the official programming language for cross-platform development using flutter.

According to Flutter’s official website: “Flutter is Google’s mobile device SDK for record-time development of high-quality native interfaces on iOS and Android. Flutter works with existing code, is used by developers and organizations worldwide, and is open source and free.

A software development kit (SDK) is simply a toolkit. It contains all the libraries, resources, documentation, and so on necessary to create a program. It is an accessory and not a language for programming. When you want to learn the production of Flutter, you need to start learning the DART language, which is pretty straightforward if you already know the OOP language.

It Is In Release Review Phase

Although used by companies like Alibaba, they only use it in certain parts of their device. Flutter is in its RELEASE PREVIEW and will ship stably on December 4th, 2018. That’s one of the reasons some developers are still wary about fluttering all out and porting their software to flutter. With that said, we haven’t noticed any bugs while creating an app using Flutter.  

Not Supported By A Large Community

You may have to wait a little longer to get your questions answered on Stack Overflow XD. Flutter is still fairly new and doesn’t have a community as large as other cross-platform solutions like React Native or pure native applications. The group is rising day by day, and we believe it will boom being it was stably launched on December 4th, 2018.

So if you’re scared of paperwork (although we believe Flutter has one of the best paperwork available online. We didn’t need to turn to another source other than the official docs), then this might be a drawback for you.

Everything In Flutter Mobile App Development Is A Widget

Now it might take some time to get used to this one. In Flutter, everything is a widget. Even the app is a total widget by itself.

It’s not intuitive for someone to start thinking wide-ranging (yes, we just made up: P). The interfaces are icons; a widget is typography; a widget is a color; a widget is a click.

It is not intuitively speaking. The first thing that pops into our mind when we think of widgets is that it could be a part of an application. It could be a module. Yet to assume it’s a full program itself is something that will take some time to wrap your head around.

It might take you a few days to a month to become comfortable with fluttering. At first, the application of margins, padding, and other features is not intuitive. You will also need to spend some time trying to grasp Box constraints. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll figure out it was worth the pain altogether.

Flutter Mobile App Development Uses Dart As The Official Language

DART is a common-purpose programming language created in 2011 by Google. It is a client-optimized language used for developing beautiful smartphone and web apps.

Developers at Google and elsewhere use Dart to create mission-critical, high-quality applications for iOS and the internet. DART is a great fit for both mobile and web apps, with features aimed at client-side development.

The apps developed using DART are real native apps whose code is compiled down to JAVA byte code, so it’s indistinguishable from real native apps at the machine level. With that said, it’s not yet a common programming language, and you may need to spend some time learning all the syntactic sugar.

Flutter Usage Has A Bigger APK Size

Don’t be shocked if you see your newly created flutter app fresh from the oven bigger than its 50–60 percent native equivalent. Flutter apps (even React Native apps) have a scale considerably greater than their native counterparts. We’ve also seen 6–7 MB of trivial flutter apps in size.

So, if your app is already large, this is something you may want to remember. You don’t want a big bloated APK to scare out your users.

The Job Market Of Flutter Apps

Flutter is truly famous for startups, but we’re not so sure among existing companies. We haven’t seen any work opening up for a flutter developer (or any cross-platform developer, as a matter of fact) on the career pages of companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Quora, etc. They’re all looking to recruit Native Developers. In essence, if money is not a problem for your company, then you will be inclined to create a native application. There’s no need to go away from your bloated APK size users just to follow something rad.

Flutter is a brilliant cross-platform solution and is rising in popularity day after day. More and more developers are supporting mobile applications using Flutter, and startups are also looking to recruit flutter developers to create their mobile apps. If you are considering entering a space for cross-platform growth, it is certainly worth looking into.

You want to refrain from cross-platforming if you can afford to have a native app for iOS and Android. It still has a long way to go until a native app can equal its price.

Some Popular Flutter Apps 

Since Flutter encourages developers to build cross-platform native apps with little or no compromise, startups and existing brands have entrusted the system for the creation of apps. Here are seven creative apps that are designed using Flutter, exemplifying its ability to create varied categories of native applications.

1. Google Ads

The Google Ads app lets users view mobile campaign stats. The software shows campaign information, including real-time updates and feedback, allows you to call an expert from Google, act on suggestions for enhancing the campaign, add / edit / remove keywords, and more.

2. Alibaba

Alibaba is created using flutter mobile app development. The Alibaba.com app is a global exchange wholesale marketplace, which integrates Flutter into the app’s power pieces. The app lets its users purchase goods from suppliers around the world, all from a mobile device’s comfort.

3. Reflect

Reflect is an Artificial Intelligence-led journal and mindfulness device. The app created using Flutter enables its users to build stories in a personal journal, give a new daily collection of questions to represent the day, unlock advanced statistics, actionable insights, all wrapped in a beautiful interface.

4. Birch Finance

Birch Finance is a credit card rewards software that lets its users handle existing cards and customize them. The app helps its users choose the right card for them (depending on their history of spending), track spending across all accounts, and provide various ways to receive and redeem rewards.

5. Hamilton Musical

The official app of the hit Broadway musical, Hamilton, is operated by Flutter. The app features exclusive daily news and videos, daily lotteries for New York, Chicago, London, and tour locations, daily quiz games, merchandise shop, and more.

6. Water Maniac

Watermaniac is an app that lets its users keep track of how much water they are drinking. The app allows its users to set a regular water target, have a list of all the drinks that users have taken (and logged in), and configure reminders to remind users of drinking water.

7. Hookle

Hookle is another application developed using Flutter, which enables its users to exchange messages, track social activity, and manage multiple social media accounts in one location. Hookle allows multiple social media platforms to write and publish posts, track events across all networks at a glance, customize posts per social media platform, and more.

About Flutter Mobile App Development In Cincinnati

It is no child’s play to create a mobile app. It needs a tactical approach and neck-deep experience in frameworks and SDKs for app growth. Startups needing to roll out an MVP within a short period may find the conventional approach to the creation of mobile apps productive. The long length, extreme dependency on too many technological components, etc. will complicate things.

It is here that can make a difference for Flutter. It can simplify the mobile app creation process without compromising on the app’s visual appeal. It will provide the MVP with native app success while making it more attractive for early adopters and investors.

Fun Fact: Flutter was codenamed “Sky” when at its project stage. Well, now that it’s a full-fledged and strong kit for the production of open-source software, the sky’s the limit for those who want to create mobile apps.

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