Why Startups Should Consider Flutter For Mobile App Development in 2022 (Updated)

Sophia Martin
Flutter Community
Published in
9 min readJul 23, 2020

Planning a tech startup? Did you know, a recent research study by Small Biz Trends reveals that 90% of the new startups fail!

The reason being, no matter how perfectly your services and products are designed and developed, it is useless if it has no users. It is true that to turn a startup into a six-figure business, people majorly put their focus on improving the quality of the product and services. But at the same time, they neglect the importance of choosing a potential platform through which users can easily approach your services or products. And in the digitized era, what’s better than having a mobile application that runs on multiple platforms.

Gone are those days when tech startups consider mobile applications an additional budget draining task for their business. In fact, now 70% of total sales are coming from mobile devices and 57% of purchases come from repeat customers. And this touch of modernity will rapidly grow in the future.

Key Facts Of Mobile App Usage

  • According to sources, it is predicted that there will be 7 billion million users all across the globe.
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  • By 2022, the annual mobile app downloads are projected to reach 258 billion which is 45% higher to 178 billion downloads in 2017.
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  • According to the latest commercial forecast, a customer spending in app stores will first pass the $100 billion mark in 2018, and is expected to reach $156.5 billion by 2022.

In the nutshell: Let’s assume you are ready to invest in mobile app development after knowing these eye-opening figures of the mobile app industry. Now the central question is, what framework should you choose to develop a modern app?

There are a number of frameworks available to adopt but the way Flutter has acquired its place in the leading technologies is truly commendable. In addition, 2 million developers have used the Flutter UI framework for building cross-platform hybrid apps in 2018 and determine its strength.

Why Startups Should Choose Flutter for Mobile App Development?

When it comes to mobile app development, there are two major options that every startup thinks of either native or cross-platform mobile applications. Since there are approx 5 million applications available on Google play store and Apple app store, targeting any particular operating system to launch your app will not be a worthy decision. And developing a native Android and ios app can be a costly deal. So the simple and budget-friendly solution for startups is to invest in cross-platform applications that can help you reach your target audience through multiple platforms.

So let’s quickly begin with the reasons why Flutter is the ultimate choice of Framework for startups?

But if you are the one who is unaware of Flutter why it has become so popular in the mobile app development industry, then let’s take a quick round of basic overview of Flutter…

Basic Understanding of Flutter and Its Background

Flutter is an advanced open-source mobile SDK (Software development Kit) that help developers to create Android and iOS mobile apps with a single codebase.

That’s not all since Flutter is a Google’s UI toolkit so building an expressive and flexible app focused on native end-user experience, will not be a complicated task for the developers.

It is launched by Google and based on its in-house programming language “Dart” and still considered as a young framework. Despite all these facts, Flutter is being used by a few industry giants including Alibaba, Hamilton Music, Tencent, and more in their software development products.

Moreover, in the short span of time, Flutter’s popularity has been clearly outshined and leaving behind some of the most powerful, successful, and leading technologies including Xamarin, Ionic, Unity, PhoneGap and so on. Moreover, the way flutter is fastly approaching React Native’s position, it is safe to say that it has a very bright future in the mobile app development sector.

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Reason to Choose Flutter for Startup Mobile App Development

With the presence of popular tools and frameworks on the market such as React Native, Ionic, Xamarin for cross-platform app development, why should startups choose Flutter for app development? What’s so exciting about flutter? Will it help startups in reaching business goals?

Let’s find the reasons to hire flutter developer in 2021:

1. Flutter Increases the Developer’s Productivity By 10x

Whether you are a startup or an entrepreneur, if there is one thing that we all are majorly concerned about, that is money. And in app development, time is money. The higher the time your app development will take, the costlier it will be.

But startups can save a lot on app development if they choose flutter mobile app development solutions. Flutter is designed with the stateful Hot Reloadfeature that actually allows developers to make instant changes in the backend and eliminate the requirement of recompilation that ultimately brings the mobile app development time down by manifold.

This is one of the most common and yet popular selling points of flutter that allows developers to see the effects of changes that they made in code. By leveraging the Hot Reload feature, developers can make changes in real-time.

2. Flutter Ensures Excellent Experience of Design

The partnership of Material Design with Flutter has created a unique mechanism that promises a powerful user experience. Moreover, Flutter comes up with unique Android and iOS power-packed widgets that offers you a native type of mobile app experience.

The widget catalog of Flutter offers you a broad choice of cross-platform tools that aren’t only used for views but also for the entire screen and even for the app itself. With Flutter’s widget, developers can create a smooth and crisp app without any hassle and leaving users with an excellent app experience.

3. Flutter Enables You Build Multiple Apps With Single Codebase

Whether it’s about launching your app on Google Play Store, App Store, or on both, Flutter lets you create functional applications by using a single code-base that smoothly runs on multiple platforms. You can bring your app idea to life on multiple platforms without hiring mobile app developers with different skills. On the other side, Flutter is a cost-effective means of developing applications for multiple channels without compromising the quality of the app. When developing an app with flutter, all you need is to hire flutter app developers

Isn’t that what all startups are actually looking for?

4. Flutter is Integrated With Google’s Firebase

If put it in simple words, then Firebase is Google’s mobile platform that provides all the major services including cloud storage, cloud functions, real-time databases, hosting, and more at one place and makes the app development process far easier and quicker.

What’s more, startups can ask for? By leveraging Google’s Firebase, startups can make their app infrastructure serverless, redundant, and scalable. Generally, while building an app, developers need to build some tools themselves for the backend support, but if developers will combine the Firebase with other tools, then they can automate the app development process.

5. Availability of Different Themes for Android/iOS Apps

It is true that Flutter can help you develop multiple applications with a single code base, but what if you want different themes for different apps?

Don’t worry, Flutter offers you the different choice of themes for different applications to ensure excellent user experience on different operating systems.

6. Flutter is a Perfect Choice for MVP Development

Being a startup, if you are running short of budget and exceeding mobile app development cost keep you from entering into the mobile app space, then Flutter will be your ultimate choice. It can help you develop a mobile app in real-time without any hassle, even with the limited resources, budget, and time.

Google’s Flutter comes up with a range of UI Native widgets, Hot Reload feature, support 2D GPU accelerated APIs, which all-in-all makes all the UI-animations super attractive and seamless.

The complete set of these features including widgets and versatile UI making Flutter a prominent choice of developers and improving the experience of customers.

7. Faster Development and Lesser Testing

Flutter mobile app development companies can reuse the app codes, which means they only need to translate the codes into different programming languages instead of writing from scratch. Therefore, it saves a couple of hours and effort writing codes for different apps. Once written codes can be used with different plugins, which ultimately saves in development time.

And as far as the Quality Assurance of the app is concerned, a single deep QA is enough to test the features, functions, and programs of the cross-platform app developed with Flutter.

Why Developing a Cross-Platform App With Flutter is a Good Decision For Startups?

Here are some additional attention points that make flutter stand apart over other frameworks:

  • Startups don’t have to worry about their budget since Flutter is a free and open-source framework so you don’t need to pay any license fee for the access.
  • It provides a one-stop-solution for development to deployment.
  • Internationalized flutter libraries allow developers to localize the application according to the language, text, and preferred layout to the specific location.
  • Ensure less development cost as you don’t need to invest separately for each platform.
  • A wide range of plugins is easily available which makes the development process much easier, faster, and smoother.
  • Flutter is comparatively easy to learn and code all because of the understandable documentation it provides to the users.

How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Cross-platform App with Flutter?

Let’s assume you have finally made your mind to develop an app with Flutter, but surely, your next question is “how much does it cost to make an app”?

Well, there are a number of software development companies that can provide you a rough estimation of app development cost between $10,000 to $50,000. But if you are looking at the app development cost to make a clone for some of the leading apps like TikTok, Facebook, Whatsapp, Talabat, Uber Eats, and more, then the development cost will be far beyond these figures.

Moreover, there are a number of cost-related factors such as app complexity, development team, features and functionality, choice of platform, and more that drive the cost of the application.

Pro Tip To Save Cost: Being a startup, it is not mandatory to directly invest a huge budget in developing an app fully loaded with modern features and complex structure. Even initially you can develop a native app with a flutter for a single platform and then as your business grows and your user base starts to increase, you can expand your app accordingly.

Furthermore, Flutter has an active and growing community, so you can get connected with the experts to know about the widgets and plugins that help you in upgrading your app with the latest features. Or you can hire mobile app developers to make your task easier.

Conclusion

To end this post, it is worth mentioning that the above-given present and futuristic features of Flutter makes it a perfect choice for Startups or for any entrepreneur who is looking to hire mobile app developers for an app that is backed by excellent design and compatible to conquer the future customer needs.

Right from faster development speed to low developmental cost, it has everything that any startup could wish for. While working with flutter is easy, but still, if you find yourself stuck anywhere in between this post, then you can get in touch with a mobile app development company for the best assistance.

https://www.twitter.com/FlutterComm

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Sophia Martin
Flutter Community

Sr. Business Analyst & Tech Writer— Xicom.biz | Write on Trending Technologies | Sr. IT Consultant. 14+ Years of Exp. | LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/2TVwiBW