As digital-first businesses continue to grow, the development of applications is no longer tailored for a single platform. The need for users to have a consistent and seamless experience across different platforms (iOS, Android, Web, Desktop, Smart TVs) has increased significantly. This will result in higher costs, longer development times, and greater difficulty in scaling due to the need to develop and maintain multiple codebases.
Google’s release of the Flutter UI toolkit has dramatically transformed the development of digital products over the past few years. Originally designed for mobile devices, Flutter has evolved into an ecosystem that enables support for multiple platforms with a single codebase. For example, the development of high-quality Flutter applications by Creatah (a high-quality Flutter application development company) has resulted in faster delivery of products, increased and more uniform quality of products, and reduced costs across industries such as fitness, wellness, health care, logistics, and SaaS.
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“One Codebase. Every Platform. Zero Compromise.”
In the past, creating applications required separate teams for:
- Android applications
- iOS applications
- Web applications
- Desktop applications
- Tablet versions (or responsive web apps)
This created additional costs, duplicate bugs, and inconsistent user experiences.
With the creation of a single codebase, Flutter compiles to native ARM code for all platforms, thereby eliminating these types of challenges associated with multi-platform application development. Because the UI, animations, and business logic work together seamlessly on all platforms, the developer only needs to write a feature once instead of writing the same feature multiple times for different platforms.
As a result of using Flutter for multi-platform application development, Creatah can build complete digital ecosystems (mobile app, web application, and admin dashboard) considerably faster than traditional development techniques. Doing so results in increased time to market and reduced costs associated with maintaining the long-term viability of that product.
2 “Pixel-Perfect, Native-Like Performance”
One of the primary advantages of Flutter is its high-performance rendering engine, known as “Skia.”Whereas WebView or native application frameworks use a set of widgets to create user interfaces (e.g. WebView widgets), Flutter generates every single pixel and offers developer discretion over how to configure:
1) The layout.
2) The animations.
3) The transitions.
4) The interaction with the user interface.
5) This provides a responsive and fluid experience, while also allowing for 60–120 FPS on most mobile devices even in high-complexity applications.
As a result, most of the time when Creatah develops applications using Flutter, specifically using hot reloading, clients will experience significant increases in:
1) Speed of the initial load.
2) No sluggish animations or delays.
3) Uniformity of the USER INTERFACE (UIC) compared to native applications; and
4) More efficient use of their battery lives.
5) For fitness and wellness-related applications where there are real-time tracking capabilities, dashboards and animations, Flutter has become an incredibly valuable strategic tool for businesses in these industries.
Cost-Efficiency Without Sacrificing Quality
Building a digital product that is cross-platform (web + mobile) typically takes about twice the amount of development time as building using only one of those platforms. By allowing developers to build the entire application on all platforms simultaneously, companies have been able to achieve 40%–50% cost savings in the development stage, as well as lower ongoing maintenance expenses and faster fixes for problems since all versions of the application can be fixed using a single patch or update. This means for most small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), emerging brands and entrepreneurs working with restricted budgets, that these cost savings can be utilized to invest more in marketing, analytics and new feature development resulting in sustained accelerated growth for many of Creatah’s clients.Through the use of Flutter, Creatah’s Flutter Team can:
- Make design iterations rapidly
- Resolve issues in seconds
- Implement very quick A/B tests
- Experiment with features without a need to redeploy the app
This results in development cycles being reduced by as many as 30-40% thus allowing for quicker products to hit the market.
Increased Customization and Beautiful User Experience
Flutter has more than just efficiency, it also aims to beautify your app; in today’s world of mobile applications, a brand wants their application to be distinctly unique, exciting and memorable. The following are offered via Flutter to help achieve this:
- Customizable Widgets
- Motion/animated
- Micro-Interaction
- Dark/light themes
- 100% customizable component
Regardless of how intricate your design may be, Flutter allows for you to build your mobile application with a custom look and feel with ease. At Creatah, we are continually creating “showpiece” UI interfaces utilising Flutter for clients in fitness, physical therapy, e-commerce, and meditation, where the visual appeal of an application will have a direct correlation to the level of user engagement and retention.
Building Apps for Scalability with a Strong Community of Support
Because of the fact that Flutter is being created by Google and contributed to by thousands of developers globally, Flutter is continually being developed and advanced. The plug-in ecosystem for Flutter has every feature required by a modern organisation from:
- Payment gateway integration
- BLE & IoT integration
- Video streaming integration
- AI/ML Integration library
- Firebase backend
- WebSocket integration for real-time chats
The above-mentioned capabilities make Flutter the best option for multi-platform app development going into the future. Creatah also utilises Flutter, therefore, we are able to scale apps from a minimal viable product (MVP) to full product and then enterprise build without having to switch frameworks or rewrite the majority of components.
Designed for MVP, Startups & Rapid Prototyping
If you are launching a new startup, testing a beta version or copyrighting your idea, Flutter is a great framework to utilise. You can launch all of the following at once:
- Mobile apps
- Web dashboards
- Progressive Web App (PWA)
- Tablet versions
With very little cost associated with developing each of these platforms at once, therefore, Creatah’s Product Strategy Team frequently advises startups to utilise Flutter to release early, gather feedback and adjust their product quickly.
Flutter is not just a framework for software development, rather, it is the catalyst for accelerating your business growth.
With the extreme flexibility, exceptional performance, cost-effectiveness and cross-platform capabilities, Flutter is now considered the gold-standard way to build modern digital products. For businesses looking to provide the same unified experience across Android, iOS, Web and Desktop,Flutter is a requirement not an option.
While Utilising Flutter for Developing Apps at Creatah, we have witnessed first-hand how Flutter helps to increase brand speed to market, improve on the overall user experience of an application so therefore provides confidence when scaling. If you are looking to create a mobile application, web-based application, SaaS solution, eCommerce platform, or healthcare Application, Flutter will provide you with the best foundation to build off of.
