Why choose Flutter for your company?
Last week you had an excellent idea for a new app and shared your findings with your colleagues and business partner, and they all love the idea.
You started the research on your potational customer base, and everything seems to point to a gap in the market that your idea can fill.
But then, on what platform do we develop this app?
Your business partner wants that the app works for IOS devices and has that high-quality native feel, but from your research, you’ve discovered that a significant portion of your customer base owns an android phone. So what do we do? Do we go native? We can build a tailor-made app for the platforms we need, or maybe cross-platform? We don’t have to make the app separate for all platforms, but we will have to sacrifice some functionality that is specific to that platform, or do we?
There are two ways to build apps these days, both have a different set of compromises on Reach & Retention, High-quality look & feel, Time to market, and Affordability.
The dilemma of mobile app development
The first option: The option that 80% of businesses are still doing today, build two entirely separate Android and IOS apps on two completely different codebases. What requires double the development teams, double the money, but in the end, you get a beautiful result in the form of our castle above us.
To get there, you got many compromises like time and affordability.
But what is the alternative?
The second option is to use the company’s third-party cross-platform tool kits that get you there much faster thanks to the use of one codebase, but the end quality is not the same, you don’t get that castle. But why?
Often these cross-platform tool kits use languages like javascript to convert it to the native platform. Still, the result is not native, and you can feel that there is something off, so another compromise on our quality and user retention.
Flutter is the third option: it’s fully native, and everything you write in Flutter, is compiled directly to native machine code. What means is what you write is what you get on your phone with no contact switch and a single codebase, So you get that direct road to the castle.
What are the pro’s of Flutter for my company
Time to Market
The most significant advantage is the speed at which you can build and show a working product. Flutter can build to Android, iOS, Web, Mac, and Windows devices.
Flutter is the ideal platform to quickly build your MVP (minimum viable product) and run your development cycles. Flutter apps run on all platforms, and with the benefits of stable hot-reload, your developers don’t have to sit through endless loops of compile builds to test the product code they just have written.
High-quality look and feel
Flutter breaks the barriers by no longer have to worry about which platform your product ships to, and thanks to this, your designer can now put all of his efforts into creating a beautiful Design and User Experience while still keeps that nice native feel.
Flutter is prepared to use 120 frames per second (fps). That means that, especially with animations, you can give an even more luxurious visual experience to your apps. Of course, your phone or tablet must be ready to support this.
Affordability
The third pro is, of course, your development costs, you no longer need separate developers for IOS, Android, and web development. Were you before required all three, you now only need the flutter developer to build your product for all the different platforms, and maybe the best thing, Flutter itself, is free.
1 codebase, 1/2 the development team, and less money needed.
For the average Minimal Viable Products (MVPs), you need around 12 weeks for the full scope of the first version of the app. If you had this done natively, it would have been about 20 weeks, so a saving of 60%.
Reach And Retention
Flutter reaches all your users by shipping your product natively to Android and ios. The behavioral changes we have learned to expect on our native platforms like scrolling and navigation are built into Flutters framework, so the development team can focus on building the app knowing the critical functions are already there. So you can create a very native driven android app or go more brand-based.
But what are the con’s of Flutter
The one disadvantage is that Flutter apps are more significant in size. Generally speaking, Flutter apps are greater than 4MB.
One other small con is that Flutter is still a young platform and has a short third-party support library. Yet, at the moment of writing this, there is already a very active developer-base that is constructing these missing libraries.
In a year or two, this con will be converted into a pro and will be one of it’s best features.
However, if you plan an app properly, then Flutter can become the best.
Some last words
Though the Dart Language is suitable for Flutter and its challenging nature makes coding sometimes tricky. You can overcome this with the support of Java, C++, C#, and Objective-C.
An excellent cross-platform app development company, on average, takes a minimum of 250 hours for creating an app that efficiently works on iOS and Android.
Today’s market is transforming digitally, and it’s an excellent time to develop mobile applications. Rather than hiring iOS and Android developers, I would suggest you hire a Flutter developer who can simultaneously create applications for iOS and Android and if your in for it for web, Mac, and Windows as well.
Undoubtedly, Flutter cross-platform is a trendsetter in the mobile app development industry, and soon, we will see more of it in the IT and software field. Hopefully, it will get a warm place inside your company.
