What Makes Flutter Such a Powerful & Popular SDK
Ever since its inception in 2015, Flutter has gone through a sea change as an open-source app development platform. The one thing that makes it such a popular choice of app developers around the world is that it is powered by Google, the world’s largest search engine. The first version of Flutter, codenamed ‘Sky’ ran on the Android operating system.
Today it has emerged as a versatile software development kit (SDK) that empowers developers worldwide to create intuitive applications for Android, Linux, iOS, Windows, and the web from a single codebase. No wonder, more than 500,000 developers use Flutter on a monthly basis. With more than 2 million users, today Flutter has also become one of the most popular app development kits.
Flutter: Ruling the App Development Trends
Recently Google claimed more than half a million users are leveraging Flutter in app development. This is not all, the world’s largest search engine also revealed the breakdown of the user behavior.
While 35% of the users work for startups, a considerable 26% of them are enterprise developers. The other 7% and 19% are design agencies and individual developers respectively.
All these figures suggest that Flutter is being used much more pervasively than any other app development platform. The factors that make Flutter such a popular choice for developers include Google’s credibility, easy adaptability to mobile, web, and desktop from a single code environment, and enhanced UI/UX.
Advantage to developers
As a versatile SDK, Flutter offers a host of features that empower app developers to create intuitive apps. Let’s find out how exactly developers are benefited by this great app development platform by Google.
The unique advantages that Flutter offers to app developers include:
An open-source SDK
Fast Development
Flexible UIs
Native Performance
Cross-Platform Performance
Single Codebase
Quick Debugging
Intuitive Widgets
Robust Community
1. An open-source SDK
Flutter is an open-source platform that can be used free of cost to create applications of all sorts. The fact that it comes from Google, gives it a lot of credibility and a host of intuitive features that developers can use to their advantage.
No matter what industry you cater to, Flutter proves to be an ideal platform to develop customized apps. Whether it is social networking, health & fitness, shopping, entertainment, education, lifestyle, or a business app, Flutter gives you a seamless workflow and easy user interface — everything free of cost.
2. Fast Development
Developers are hard-pressed for a time while creating customized apps as the time to market it a significant factor. Flutter helps them enhance their development speed by offering ready to use widgets. You can add almost any functionality by using these widgets.
Features such as Stateful Hot Reload further add to your daily productivity. The fully customizable widgets empower app developers to deliver native app interfaces within minimum turnarounds.
3. Flexible UIs
Flutter comes fully loaded with a material design architecture that you can leverage to create expressive UIs. The UI that you create using Flutter works as native for your users and the best part is that these user interfaces automatically adapt to different platforms.
The inbuilt widgets of Flutter come in as handy tools to build UI that will automatically incorporate the major components of both Android and iOS platforms.
4. Native Performance
Google has designed Flutter to give your apps native performance on both Android as well as iOS platforms. To achieve this goal, the Flutter code has been compiled as native to ARM machine code that uses Dart native compiler. This smart feature of Flutter enables the widgets to incorporate all the platform differences such as scrolling, navigation, and icons, etc.
5. Cross-Platform Performance
Flutter is one SDK that empowers developers to create cross-platform apps from a single codebase. It is this intuitive functionality that makes it the preferred choice of app developers around the world.
The good thing about this app development platform from Google is that it offers a steep learning curve. Developers, who are new to Flutter, take much less time to be proficient with all its functionalities.
6. Single Codebase
The one feature of Flutter that makes it unique is that it uses a single codebase to create apps for multiple platforms. It simply means that mobile app developers are absolved from the complicated task of writing multiple codes for different platforms.
As a developer, all you have to do is write the app code on Flutter, and the SDK will take care of the rest for you. The best part is that apps created on Flutter work as native on both Android and iOS.
7. Quick Debugging
Flutter comes fully equipped with state-of-the-art features like Stateful Hot Reload that not only speed up your app development process but also make debugging of codes simple and easy.
Hot Reload empowers you to test your code and check the result without losing your state in the emulator. This freedom from going back and forth in the development process further adds to your app development speed.
8. Intuitive Widgets
To add speed and accuracy to your app development process, Flutter offers everything as a widget. Whether it is UI, dashboard, app-specific functionality, or any other feature, everything comes as a widget that you can customize to drive the desired performance.
These widgets are available in the form of a widget tree. All you have to do is simply pick up your functionality and write your code in the respective widget to customize it.
9. Robust Community
Within a short span of time Flutter has developed a robust and vibrant user community, thanks to its popularity among developers around the world. Today, Flutter is among the top ten GitHub communities and is offering active support to developers. Simply raise a ticket on GitHub and the required help will be readily available to you.
The Preferred Choice of Enterprises
Besides individual app developers, a number of prominent app development company and organizations are banking upon Flutter to build customized apps. Here’s a list of prominent users:
Alibaba Group: A prominent player in the commodity eCommerce arena, Alibaba is banking on Flutter to build their app. By leveraging the intuitive feature of Flutter, they intend to enhance the overall UI/UX of their buyers.
Groupon: The American global eCommerce marketplace specializing in connecting subscribers to local merchants has also launched its Flutter-based app in the market. The app is helping them connect with customers in more than 15 countries.
BMW: The world’s leading manufacturer of premium passenger cars is also using Flutter to power its app.
eBay: As per Flutter’s official site eBay used Flutter to build an application to provide an expressive UI to its users.
In addition to this list of prestigious clients, a host of other prominent global businesses are also using Flutter to power their apps. These businesses include Google, Capital One, Tencents, and Emmar.
Flutter Developers and Cost of Development
Flutter being a relatively new platform, finding skilled developers to create customized apps on the platform is a perpetual challenge for app development companies and entrepreneurs. While big enterprises are able to afford the expensive resources, individual business owners and entrepreneurs find it difficult to hire the right skill sets.
Here’s a snapshot of what it would cost you to hire a Flutter app development company in different parts of the world
- North America: $150-$200/hour
- Latin America: $50/hour
- Western Europe: $50-$100/hour
- Eastern Europe: $25-$50/hour
- Ukraine: $25-$50/hour
- India: $15–35/hour
- Australia: $100-$150/hour
To design the navigation of a Flutter based app it generally takes up to 300 hours. Similarly, adding functionalities such as video chats, text chats, and other communication tools may take up to 50 hours. Payment integration will take an additional 50 hours. You can well imagine how much it would cost to make a feature-rich Flutter app.
Cost-effective Flutter App Development
If you are in North America, Australia, or Europe and want a feature-rich Flutter app for your business, it might cost you a fortune to hire a suitable mobile app development service provider. While most of the good talent is absorbed by big conglomerates, the remaining resources in the market would not like to bring down their charges.
In such a scenario, if you really want to bring down your app development cost, it makes perfect business sense to hire dedicated Flutter app developers at a location where the charges are affordable. By doing so, you can bring down your Flutter app development cost by up to 60%.
Conclusion
Flutter is relatively a new entrant in the app development scene but the platform has created a real flutter in the market with its intuitive features, easy user interface. The brand name of Google is like icing on the cake. The one big aspect that goes in its favor is that it is an open-source offering from Google.
By ticking every important checkmark of a reliable SDK, Flutter has for sure carved its own niche in the app development industry. You as a business can make the most of this platform by hiring dedicated Flutter experts in cost-effective destinations like India.
