Flutter is rapidly gaining popularity and adoption among top web development firms globally. Developers have readily embraced it. Its use in mobile and IoT development is expected to skyrocket in the coming years. This article will delve into the top 10 benefits of using Flutter for mobile and IoT (Internet of Things) development.
Choosing Flutter makes sense for developers. However, its business advantages are what truly matter. What makes it so popular? This blog post will explore the top 10 advantages of Flutter for mobile app development.
Let’s examine why it’s a great choice for businesses, helping you make a well-informed decision.
What is Flutter?
Developed by Google, Flutter is an open-source technology that enables the creation of native Android and iOS apps from a single codebase. It’s a comprehensive SDK (software development kit) containing everything needed for cross-platform mobile app development. This includes a rendering engine, pre-built widgets, command-line tools, APIs for integration, and testing features.
Benefits of Flutter for Mobile and IoT App Development
1 Faster Development: Flutter’s Advantages
Cross-platform technologies generally aim to reduce development time and expedite the entire process. Flutter, capable of writing code for both Android and iOS, offers the unique advantage of shortening development time by up to 70%.
Compared to native development, it effectively cuts the development time in half. While this significantly reduces development time, some fine-tuning is still needed to ensure seamless rendering on both platforms for optimal Flutter development benefits.
Flutter’s “hot reload” feature allows instant visualization of changes, a significant advantage that preserves the current application state. This feature accelerates debugging and allows experimentation, leading to rapid creation of high-quality applications. This leads us to the next benefit.
2 Customizable and Animated UI
Flutter excels in design flexibility; everything is customizable. Achieving UI customization on native platforms usually requires significant effort and development time. However, Flutter offers a more flexible and versatile process without increasing workload. Effortlessly implement element transitions, manipulate color/shape/shadow, apply clipping, and perform modifications and transformations.
Denver’s mobile app development experts recognize that cross-platform frameworks facilitate codebase sharing across target platforms. However, Flutter stands out by enabling the sharing of both the UI and its code. Sharing business logic and UI with Flutter saves time, resources, and effort without compromising the final product’s performance. This highlights the major advantages of Flutter development.
3 Cost-Effectiveness: A Key Benefit of Flutter
The combination of reduced development time by up to 70%, customization freedom, enhanced performance, faster deployment, and future-proof application development is significant. It translates to substantial cost savings. Separate development and testing teams for iOS and Android platforms are unnecessary.
These factors make Flutter mobile development exceptionally suitable for PoC and MVP projects. Whether you’re a startup, a large corporation, or a renowned brand, showcasing an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to potential investors is crucial. Flutter is a reliable choice, supporting the MVP approach and enabling app development with minimal cost and time investment.
4 High Performance
Considered more mature than React Native, Flutter surpasses it in performance. Its engine directly interacts with native modules, resulting in excellent performance and impressive speed.
Whether you’re building a single-page app, a mobile platform with video streaming, or a data-intensive IoT application, Flutter ensures consistent stability and high performance. Flutter applications are directly compiled into machine code, eliminating performance issues during interpretation. This showcases another top advantage of Flutter development.
5 Native-like Performance: A Top Flutter Development Advantage
Flutter has won over many developers due to its remarkable native-like performance. The Flutter toolkit provides all the necessary components, libraries, and widgets to replicate the look and feel of native Android or iOS applications, or even create similar mobile experiences.
While debated by some, Flutter is widely regarded as production-ready. It seamlessly runs on major platforms including Android, Windows, iOS, Linux, web browsers, macOS, and even various embedded devices. Flutter apps function flawlessly without requiring modifications to the Dart code.
6 Simultaneous Launch
Flutter’s “write once, run anywhere” approach allows developers to write code for both platforms concurrently. With a single codebase, one development team, and a plethora of plugins, tools, and libraries, building applications becomes fast and efficient. It doesn’t get any better than this. Simultaneous development for both platforms enables synchronized app launches. Industry giants like Alibaba, Netflix, Watermaniac, The New York Times, and BMW have embraced Flutter for their applications.
Flutter offers a straightforward interaction method between Dart and platform-native code, allowing execution on both native and Flutter apps. It seamlessly handles advanced OS-level features, permission management, Bluetooth communication, sensor data, and credentials. Google provides ready-to-use plugins for both IoT and mobile app development. The Flutter team has got you covered!
7 Faster Deployment
Deployment is a breeze with Flutter. It significantly reduces development time by up to 70% compared to other alternatives. Developing a single codebase for both platforms often halves the required staff hours.
The primary reason is straightforward: streamlined development, resource optimization, multi-platform support, efficient testing, customizable UI options, superior performance, and future-readiness for IoT applications. Testing mobile and IoT apps becomes faster and less cumbersome. The time to market is automatically shortened due to accelerated development and deployment phases.
8 Gamification-Friendly
Gamification is rapidly gaining traction, especially in sectors like fitness, eLearning, and entertainment. Innovative games and creative apps are increasingly popular; Google’s recently introduced Stadia streaming platform is being developed using Flutter.
Gamification elements are now integrated into various app categories, including banking, payment wallets, eCommerce, consumer apps, and utilities. Flutter allows developers to combine these elements with custom animations and UI, creating engaging gamified experiences within mobile apps. These features ensure excellent performance and speed with reduced effort. Flutter makes it easy to build custom widgets or modify existing ones during the design and development stages.
9 High Productivity: Flutter’s Benefits in Mobile and IoT Development
Flutter is a game-changer for scalable mobile and IoT app development. Apps are built using Dart, an object-oriented programming language known for its simple syntax, making it accessible to Java and JavaScript developers.
Over the years, it has significantly boosted web development productivity. It allows writing a single codebase for multiple platforms, resulting in remarkable productivity, business value, maintenance-wise, and most importantly, maintainable code. Using Skia, it renders itself onto a platform-provided canvas. This engine enables the built-in UI to run seamlessly on various platforms. Many aspects demonstrate the power of its high-performance cross-platform rendering engine. With Flutter, UI adjustments for different platforms are unnecessary.
10 Future-Proofing
Flutter is evolving rapidly. In just a few years, its versatility has extended to building IoT applications like cashierless stores, smart home devices, autonomous banks, and drone delivery services. As the demand for IoT app development surges, Flutter is at the forefront.
Impressively, Flutter has the potential to transcend mobile and power applications for a broader range of platforms. Desktop, web, and embedded systems are gaining momentum. At the recent I/O conference, Google showcased a technical preview of Flutter running unmodified applications directly in browsers.
Flutter’s Benefits in Mobile and IoT Development: Conclusion
Flutter is the fastest way to launch high-performing cross-platform mobile or IoT applications. It poses minimal risk to your business and is worth considering. It’s poised to become the ultimate cross-platform UI framework. Are you looking to hire mobile app developers? Get in touch with us to discuss your Flutter project.