Flutter App Development Guide 2024 – All You Need to Know
Mobile app development has become a rising trend in the world of technology, especially in the recent few years. With a mobile phone in the hands of most of the population, people want almost all of their lives managed by mobile apps. There’s an app for everything: ride booking, food ordering, logistics, entertainment, buying clothes, shoes, jewelry, groceries, books, and even plants.
According to forecasts by Statistica, the global app market is expected to grow by 8.83% by 2027, reaching a volume of $673.80 billion. However, creating mobile apps requires significant investments and careful consideration of a user-first approach that can be achieved by cross-platform app development. One of the latest additions to this in terms of an all-in-one software development framework is Flutter. Flutter, developed by Google, offers a set of libraries, tools, and widgets for overall app development with lower development time and high performance.
Seeing the future of mobile apps in 2024, this Flutter App Development Guide uncovers everything you need to know about app development through Flutter in years to come.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is an open-source framework developed by Google using the Dart programming language in 2017. The current stable version of this framework is Flutter 3.19, launched in February 24. The framework comes as software development kits and a defined set of usable and replaceable libraries for app development.
Ever since its launch into the public domain, Flutter has emerged as a game-changing tool for the world of mobile app development. Talking about the numbers, a survey conducted by Statista.com in 2022 on the most popular cross-platform framework for mobile app development, Flutter, ranked number one, owing to its ease of operability and reliability.Again, going by the numbers, nearly 500,000 apps have been successfully built using this framework till now. Flutter solves the most complex problem of the tech world- delivering a seamless experience across all platforms through cross-platform development.
What makes Flutter an Ideal Platform for Cross-platform Apps?
Cross-platform mobile app development platforms enable the creation of applications for the web, desktop, and mobile devices. They must, at the very least, support at least one additional “experience,” which can include conversations, wearables, and AR. Flutter as an application development platform does exactly the same. An application developed using Flutter delivers users an outstanding experience with intuitive navigation. It also reduces development time and resource usage for developers.
What is a user-first approach, and how can this equation be cracked?
According to Apple, the App Store now has more than 123 times as many apps as the store used to have in 2008. In the coming year, we can expect to see mobile app creation become easier on both the development side and end-user side as generative AI takes over the tech space, making mobile apps even smarter, efficient, and possibly even cheaper.
To sum up, the user-first approach in mobile app development emphasizes delivering exceptional user experiences. This can be achieved with an intuitive-looking UI, easy navigation, or simply by maintaining a seamless experience across all platforms.
Single Codebase For All Platforms
Flutter is a potent framework that enables developers to write one codebase that works seamlessly across various platforms like Android and iOS. This means that apps built with Flutter can be used by different operating systems and different mobile and desktop devices with a consistent user experience. The single codebase simplifies the development process, saves engineering resources, ensures consistency, and reduces the chances of platform-specific bugs.
Faster Time To Market
Flutter is a prominent framework that has already been adopted by some of the biggest names in the tech industry, including Google, Alibaba, and BMW.
The architecture of Flutter is multi-layered and has optional and replaceable independent libraries. Due to this, Flutter lets you develop apps faster than ever. When Alibaba’s Xianyu app was built using Flutter, it saw a 60% reduction in development time compared to its previous development process. This SDK also offers a range of state management solutions like BLoC and Redux for predictable state management.
Increased Productivity With The Hot Reload Feature
The Hot Reload feature in Flutter is a game-changer, especially in a collaborative development environment where iteration must be done in real-time. Hot reload facilitates effective communication and collaboration among team members, as others can instantly see changes made by one developer. Flutter allows developers to instantly see the impact of code changes without restarting the entire application. This boosts productivity by facilitating quick experimentation, debugging, and fine-tuning, leading to more efficient development workflows.
Improved User Experience
Today’s app development landscape relies heavily on the user-first approach; hence, delivering a seamless user experience is an essential metric for determining the success of any application. With Flutter, developers can create visually appealing and interactive user experiences. Flutter has some customizable widgets and rich motion APIs that allow for creating visually appealing animations and transitions. Even with hot reloads, developers can see the changes they make in real time without rebuilding the entire app. Flutter’s reactive programming model also enables mobile app developers to create apps with seamless and responsive interfaces, ensuring that the user interface always remains in sync with the underlying data.
Workflow Transformation With Automated Development
Contemporary applications and systems require effective communication to deliver a smooth user experience and minimize the need for frequent context switching. This is done using Workflow automation. Flutter automates the development workflows to reduce the manual efforts traditionally associated with cross-platform app development. This transformation streamlines processes minimizes errors and enables the application components to work cohesively by triggering actions based on specific events or data.
Time-Efficient Testing
Flutter’s cross-platform nature reduces the need to run the same tests on multiple platforms. This time-efficient testing process simplifies the quality assurance phase, ensuring robust and reliable applications.
Industry-Wide Use Cases For Flutter App Development
Creating an app using Flutter requires trade-offs between a designer’s artistic vision and the adoption of the latest technologies.
Here are the types of applications we believe Flutter is the most suitable for,
E-Commerce Shopping App:
Flutter is well-suited for building e-commerce shopping apps with rich and interactive user interfaces (take Alibaba as an example). Flutter’s customizable widgets and fast development cycles enable businesses to create visually appealing and feature-rich shopping experiences for customers across different platforms.
On-demand Apps:
Flutter is considered the best choice for building on-demand apps. On-demand apps have to scale with changing marketing dynamics, and Flutter’s ability to create visually engaging interfaces and seamless animations enhances the user experience. Its cross-platform compatibility ensures consistent performance across devices.
Apps for Healthtech:
Healthtech as an industry is personal, and so is how users require experiences to be personalized and seamless. These apps need to run smoothly. Otherwise, the app can leave users confused, and they will eventually leave your app. Flutter mobile app development is a great choice for building a high-performance healthcare app due to its performance, easy navigation interfaces, and speed.
Flutter App Development Process: Know the Architecture
Flutter is compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux due to its flexible architecture and ability to create apps with a single codebase. However, to achieve a seamless user experience for software built on Flutter, it’s equally important to understand Flutter’s app development architecture.
Usually, a framework’ like Flutter’s architecture is the compilation of overall design and structure, including code, components, integrations, data flows, algorithms, and infrastructure. This architecture in Flutter is a layered and extensible system of independent libraries that allow you to build cross-platform applications. However, no layer can access the layer below, and every part of the layers is designed to be optional and replaceable.
Even Flutter’s modular structure allows you the flexibility in choosing the components you need for your app.
Here are the Layers of Flutter
Framework Layer:
The first layer in Flutter is the framework layer, which provides a comprehensive set of tools, libraries, and APIs for building user interfaces and handling user interactions. This layer includes widgets, a rendering engine, an animation framework, and a gesture recognition system. Widgets are the building blocks of Flutter UIs, and the rendering engine ensures fast and smooth performance across different platforms.
Engine Layer:
Right beneath the framework layer, there is an engine layer, which is responsible for rendering UI components, handling input events, and managing platform-specific tasks. The engine of Flutter is written in C++ and includes Skia, a 2D graphics library, for rendering UI elements. It interacts with the platform-specific code through platform channels, allowing Flutter apps to access native features and functionalities.
Platform Layer:
The last layer of Flutter is the platform layer which consists of platform-specific code. Flutter provides plugins and packages for accessing platform-specific features, such as camera, GPS, file system, and network connectivity. Developers can leverage these plugins to integrate native functionalities into their Flutter apps seamlessly.
List of Essential Widgets you need to know
The widgets in Flutter are a composition abstraction. Each render object has a corresponding class in the widgets layer. In addition, the widget can be seen as a mini version of any specific part of your app’s interface in the form of a building block that describes how a particular UI piece should look and behave. Here is the list of widgets that help in Flutter app development.
Container is a versatile widget that contains other widgets and provides control over their appearance, positioning, and decoration.
Text widget displays a string of text with a single style. The widget also allows for customization of the text’s appearance, such as font size, color, alignment, and style.
Row and Column widgets are used to arrange child widgets horizontally (Row) or vertically (Column).
Image widgets display images from various sources, including assets, network URLs, and image formats, such as options for resizing, cropping, and caching.
Button widgets in Flutter are used to create interactive buttons with different visual styles and behaviors.
TextField widget allows users to input text interactively by supporting customizable text editing features.
ListView widget handles large widget lists by rendering only the visible items and improving performance.
AppBar widget represents the top app bar, typically used for displaying the app’s title, actions, and navigation controls.
Material Design Widgets provide pre-designed UI components for building visually consistent and aesthetically pleasing applications.
Cupertino widgets are inspired by Apple’s iOS design language and offer iOS-specific UI components for creating applications with a native iOS look and feel.
Brands That Adopted Flutter
Flutter has already been used to develop apps by some of the biggest names in the tech industry, including Google, Instagram, Alibaba, and BMW. Due to Flutter’s multi-layered Architecture of independent libraries, the framework lets you develop high-performing apps faster than ever. Here are some of the popular apps built using Flutter
Google Ads:
Built with Flutter, Google Ads lets you manage and run Google ad campaigns effortlessly from your smartphone. With an intuitive and aesthetically pleasing interface, it provides real-time statistics, bid and budget updates, live alerts, keyword editing, and direct access to Google experts, allowing you to track ad performance from any location.
KlasterMe:
KlasterMe is another Flutter-built social media platform that stands out because of its user-friendly interface. KlasterMe lets users build their pages and share images, blogs, essays, surveys, and entries. The platform simplifies posting by exclusively using content from other KlasterMeers, creating an attractive design.
Reflectly:
Reflectly is an AI-powered personal journaling app, built on Flutter. The app is designed to enhance mental well-being by integrating cognitive behavioral therapy, meditation, and positive psychology to assist users in managing daily stress, resolving negative thoughts, and fostering positivity. The app offers detailed insights into daily emotions and valuable advice from self-help experts to support users in maintaining good mental health.
Xianyu by Alibaba:
Flutter has hugely contributed to the success of Xianyu, Alibaba’s platform, with over 200 million registered users. This Marketplace connects buyers and sellers over one platform. With Flutter’s support, Xianyu delivers a user-friendly interface, ensuring a seamless experience for its vast user base.
PostMuse – Instagram Photo Editing:
Instagram, once started as a photo-sharing app, is now evolving into a full-fledged professional platform. Hence, leveraging Flutter’s capabilities, Instagram launched its photo editing app PostMuse, which allows users to view, edit, and design multiple Instagram photos. It goes beyond mere editing, offering recommendations for the best pictures to enhance the authenticity of your social media marketing.
How to Get Started with Flutter?
App Ideation and Market Research
For app development using Flutter, let’s start from scratch. You need to have an idea in place as the first step. One must have a future-proof idea of what kind of application they wish to build. Conducting thorough market research to learn about the target audience will help you identify what competitors are doing in the same industry. In the meantime, have an imagination of what the app with functionalities and features would look like. The former and latter allow businesses to jot down a requirement list to move further in the process.
Hire a Flutter App Development Company
Once the ideation is done, hire a reliable Flutter app development company that co-innovates with you. The ideal company will have strong expertise to build, test, and develop a product that aligns with its client’s business strategy. A complete digital transformation company will also consult you through the journey of identifying the app’s features and value proposition, establishing your app as a product-market fit. Remember that choosing the best service provider can open doors for transforming an app idea into a sound, full-fledged product.
MVP Development
Due to the faster development cycles, Flutter is the best choice for releasing the beta version of your app and validating the app’s features and functionality with the real audience. Hence, Flutter and minimum viable product (MVP) are the two core elements of every app-building strategy, with minimal cost and quick development concerned. But before jumping onto why their combination is ideal for a business, let’s quickly catch up on what MVP is.
A minimum viable product (MVP) is a bare essential version of an app. Its primary purpose is to determine the value of a product and validate the idea. The MVP is launched among a selected pool of users to understand their behavior and get feedback. The user feedback is then used to make improvements to the final product. This procedure helps businesses, especially startups, to save time and money instead of putting huge dollars straight into a complex app.
Flutter App Development Cost?
On average, Flutter application development can cost you around $25,000 to $200,000. However, these figures are based on rough estimations and may vary depending on several parameters, such as the app’s category, its complexity, integrated features, design, development process, etc. The cost of developing the overall app depends on a number of factors, and location is one of them.
To get a clear picture of project pricing, one must consult a market-leading Flutter App Development Company. Their expert team can understand the project requirements, conduct market research, and provide a budget proposal accordingly.
Nevertheless, here is a standard estimation of Flutter-based app development cost:
App Type
Complexity Level
Average Cost
Timeframe
Basic app
Simple UI and MVP functionality
$25,000- $40,000
2-3 months
Medium complex app
Advanced features and customized UI
$40,000-$60,000
3-6 months
Highly complex app
Highly advanced functionality and bespoke interface
Ever since Google launched Flutter in 2017, it has caused quite a stir in the mobile app development ecosystem. Flutter is used to build high-performance, low-latency apps for iOS and Android. Flutter builds on top of the Material Design specification, which ensures a consistent look and feel across all platforms. The framework has since grown with yearly updates, changes, and ecosystem enhancements regularly. The future potential for Flutter development is vast for developers, teams, and organizations.
Successive Digital has an expert team of Flutter App developers with detail-to-design, expertise and technical acumen. If you have a cross-platform app idea, contact our experts and let us build infinite possibilities and enable you to deliver exceptional user experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Flutter is an open-source software development kit used for building cross-platform applications. Developed by Google and released in 2017, the Flutter framework helps create applications for multiple platforms, including mobile, web, desktop, and embedded.
Powered by Dart and supported by Google, Flutter is the most preferred SDK for cross-platform app development. It improves productivity and allows developers to create multi-channel apps at the same time with the use of a single codebase.
Based on a rough estimation, the cost of Flutter app development can range between $25,000 to $200,000. However, remember that the actual cost will vary on various factors, including app’s complexity level, integrated features, and, location and size of the hired app development company. You must consult a trusted service provider to get a precise cost breakdown of your app project.