How Does A Custom Flutter App Benefit Businesses
Flutter is a dynamic technology in the ever-changing world of technology; it provides flexibility, efficiency and outstanding performance. Flutter is an SDK made by Google in 2017 that assists developers in creating beautiful and high-performing apps across platforms without sacrificing quality.
Statista states it is the second most popular open-source, cross-platform mobile framework among developers and has supported over 100,000 applications since its release.
This article will explore Flutter and how businesses can benefit from customised Flutter app development.
Flutter is a powerful tool that represents Dart as a backend language in a robust mobile framework for iOS or Android applications. Flutter developers can create web, mobile or Mac applications from a single codebase. It’s used to make high-quality, natively compiled cross-platform applications.
It is written in Google's Dart programming language, with front-end development as its primary focus. This means you can personalise buttons, forms sliders, etc. because they are reusable UI components within the Flutter framework, but only if you want them to differ from their default look; otherwise, don't bother customising anything! Moreover, there are also libraries like HTTP, which allow communication between apps running on other devices connected through the internet.
With Flutter, developers can quickly build responsive, beautiful, fast user interfaces as this platform comes with rich integrated widgets, which saves time on the coding part while giving better results during the runtime phase too; not only that but even adding new features becomes more accessible due to its extensible nature.
What makes Flutter unique?
These vital features of Flutter enable businesses to save time and money on app development processes. It allows a Flutter app development company to create apps with smooth animations and interactive designs. Let's evaluate these features:
- Cross-platform support: Flutter provides cross-platform support, enabling developers to create natively compiled applications using a single codebase for web, mobile, and desktop. This means that when developing mobile apps, there's no need to write individual codes for Android and iOS, thus saving time and deployment costs.
- Available SDK and native features: Flutter simplifies the development process by utilising platform APIs, native code, and third-party integrations, making it easier for developers to build applications.
- Open source platform: Flutter is open source and free to use. It allows you to integrate third-party libraries and various packages in your app, be it videos, chats, ads, or other features.
- Hot Reload: The Hot Reload feature enables real-time modifications to the code and allows developers to see the results on your device or emulator. This evolutionary development process speeds up UI development and fosters experimentation.
- Expressive Widgets: Flutter offers a wide range of libraries of widgets that serve as building blocks for your user interface. These highly customisable widgets allow the Flutter app development company to create precise, customised designs and responsive layouts. Flutter has you covered whether you require buttons, text, images, or complex layouts.
How businesses are gaining the benefits of customised Flutter apps across various industries
Many businesses from various industries have hired Flutter developers to leverage the benefits of custom Flutter apps. Top industries and cases are capitalising on Flutter to reap its multifaceted benefits, speed up digital transformation, and enhance user experience.
Let us guide you through this article to explore industries and use cases for Flutter app development.
Flutter for Media & Entertainment
It uses a reactive programming model and Dart programming language, allowing for smooth, responsive animations and user interfaces. This is essential for entertainment apps that rely on complex animations and interactive features to provide an engaging user experience.
Flutter's hot reload and cross-platform support enables quick prototyping and idea validation. Its flexibility in designing UI with customisable widgets and layouts also empowers developers to create unique and stunning apps.
Hamilton: The first successful app built with Flutter
Flutter app development services gained significant recognition after the first successful launch of the Hamilton app, the Broadway musical.
Hamilton app picked up on Flutter even before Flutter reached its stable 1.0 release version in December 2018. The app was a substantial project showcasing Flutter's capabilities in a high-profile, real-world, and different application area.
Flutter's seamless performance on iOS and Android platforms showcases its potential for creating visually appealing and functionally rich cross-platform applications, helping establish Flutter's reputation as a popular framework for mobile app development.
inKino Cinema Movie Show Time Browser app
The inKino app, developed using Flutter and Dart, allows users to view movies and showtimes at Finnkino Cinemas. The mobile app is available for iOS and Android and has been developed using Flutter, while the PWA version uses AngularDart. Notably, the Flutter mobile app and its web platform shared approximately 40% of the code in this specific Dart project.
Flutter for E-commerce and M-commerce
In the e-commerce and m-commerce industries, renowned businesses like Alibaba and NTFY have used Flutter app development. This decision has created highly interactive user interfaces with exceptional performance, crucial for retaining and engaging customers in these spaces.
Additionally, due to Flutter's single codebase feature, businesses have witnessed significant benefits in cost-effectiveness and a quick development process.
Alibaba’s Xianyu: Flutter’s e-commerce breakthrough
Alibaba developed the Xianyu app (iOS, Android), an online application for used items. Upon the launch of Flutter, it adopted the platform to showcase its scalability and performance capabilities.
With millions of users using the app, it showcased Flutter's ability to provide a seamless and user-friendly interface. This was made possible by Flutter's efficient rendering and fast-loading features, which are crucial for any e-commerce and m-commerce platform.
NTFY: Award-winning mCommerce app
NTFY: an app designed for Poland's diet caterer. The Nice To Fit You App (available on iOS and Android) was revamped using Flutter to improve user experience, boost engagement, and drive sales.NTFY is a central hub for order management and efficiently handles over 200,000 meal orders daily.
This showcases how Flutter app development services can enhance user satisfaction and mobile app performance. The app was also honoured with the Mobile Trend Awards 2022.
Flutter for Automotive Industry
The automotive sector is another industry that utilised Flutter for mobile app development, with MyBMW and eBay Motors as a case in point. The My BMW app, built with Flutter, offers logistical support to BMW car owners, and eBay Motors allows users to explore, buy, and sell vehicles and parts. This blend of aesthetics and performance showcases Flutter's versatility, proving its capacity to be used in diverse industries, including automotive software development.
my BMW: Driving innovation in the automotive industry
The BMW app for iOS and Android serves as a comprehensive assistant for BMW owners, demonstrating Flutter's capabilities in the automation sector. This app enables users to schedule services, control their vehicles remotely, and access detailed information. It showcases how Flutter can be utilised for applications requiring high levels of security and data processing while providing a well-crafted and user-centric interface.
eBay Motors
eBay Motors is compatible with iOS and Android and designed exclusively for automotive sales. It enables users to explore, purchase, and sell vehicles and parts. The application utilises Flutter's UI capabilities to display a vast inventory in a user-friendly and organised manner.
Flutter for Finance
The financial industry, including banks and fintech companies, uses Flutter to create mobile apps for customers. The framework's ability to handle real-time updates and large amounts of data offers seamless services to users on various platforms, making it suitable for these apps.
Leading companies are taking advantage of Flutter app development due to the framework's capability to securely and efficiently manage complex operations—a crucial requirement in the finance industry. Here are some examples of top-notch Fintech apps built with Flutter:
Zerodha
Zerodha, a prominent Indian fintech company, has adopted Flutter’s cross-platform app development framework to revamp its mobile trading platform, Kite. They encountered the limitations of native development, which included cross-platform compatibility issues and complex maintenance.
Zerodha used Flutter's framework to create a seamless experience on Android and iOS devices while maintaining high performance. By taking advantage of Flutter's extensive widget library and declarative syntax, Zerodha simplified and streamlined UI development, leading to an attractive and user-friendly interface. Embracing Flutter enabled Zerodha to utilise a single codebase for Android and iOS, saving on development costs and speeding up time to market.
Google Pay
Google Pay is a digital wallet platform and online payment system allowing users to make contactless payments from their mobile phones conveniently. The Google Pay team leveraged Flutter to write code once in Dart and effortlessly deploy it on iOS and Android, resulting in a seamless experience across both platforms.
This approach enhanced the team's efficiency and enabled the team to iterate quickly using the hot reload function. Presently available in 42 countries, Google Pay competes directly with various apps and services, including Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, PayPal, Venmo, Simplifi, Truebill, and Shop, as well as online banks like Ally.
Flutter for Health and Wellness
Many healthcare organisations and companies are partnering with Flutter app development company to develop mobile apps for healthcare professionals and patients. The framework's capacity to manage sensitive data and adhere to strict regulations makes it a highly suitable choice for the industry. Furthermore, Flutter offers a variety of packages for Android, GoogleFit, and iOS Healthkit, providing excellent connectivity to healthcare applications.
Coach Yourself – Medication and Fitness App
This app enables users to practice mindfulness and attain their desired emotional states, promoting a healthy lifestyle. Developers have utilised a range of Flutter widgets and packages to create an aesthetically pleasing interface. Moreover, it ensures a uniform User Interface across Android and iOS devices, including iPad.
Watermaniac
A water intake tracking app. This healthcare app, built using Flutter app development services, is designed to help users monitor and improve their water consumption for better hydration, supporting optimal mental and physical functions. Watermaniac features a user-friendly interface, allowing users to easily set reminders, customise notifications, and track their water intake progress.
Flutter for Real Estate
Flutter is ideal for real estate apps, providing organised property listings, detailed property information, and displaying high-resolution images. Flutter's smooth graphics rendering engine ensures a responsive and engaging user interface.
Additionally, its hot reload feature speeds up development and is helpful for frequent updates to listings, prices, and other information. Now, let's look at the examples of companies using Flutter in this industry.
Real Estate listing on Realtor.com
Realtor.com has leveraged Flutter's compositional approach to create engaging pages for various listings. They have achieved this by incorporating multiple widgets and reusable components. Their team efficiently revamped and rolled out the listing detail pages thanks to Flutter, seamlessly integrating more complex animations within a few weeks.
QuintoAndar
QuintoAndar, a famous real estate company in Brazil, developed its mobile app using Flutter. The company strategically hired Flutter developers to capitalise on the platform's strong performance, swift development, iterative capabilities, and ability to create applications for multiple platforms from a single codebase.
Additionally, they realised Flutter enabled them to create an app consistently across Android and iOS platforms. QuintoAndar's app allows users to search for rental properties effortlessly, view listing details and images, schedule tours, and seamlessly complete the rental process all within the app. By leveraging Flutter for their business, they confidently deliver a swift and seamless user experience, which is crucial in the highly competitive real estate market.
Flutter for social media.
Flutter is the preferred platform for developers as it facilitates the creation of high-quality apps with minimal effort. Its comprehensive set of tools and libraries streamlines app development, while the powerful widgets and animations empower developers to craft visually appealing user interfaces. Therefore, Flutter is an excellent choice for building social media apps.
While no prominent social media apps have been developed using Flutter, there are applications designed to simplify the management of various social media accounts, such as
Hookle – For managing social media profiles
Hookle is a top-rated social media management app developed using Flutter for Android and iOS devices. It's designed to simplify the lives of small business owners, entrepreneurs, and individuals.
Hookle is an innovative social media app built on the Flutter framework. It effortlessly empowers users to share posts across multiple channels in real time.
Users with a unified dashboard can efficiently manage their accounts and monitor activities across various social media platforms. Additionally, the app offers customisation options for posts. The widespread adoption of Hookle underscores the capability of the Flutter framework to support business ideas that involve frequent user engagement with its interface.
PostMuse and Klaster – For creators
PostMuse helps Instagram creators and influencers enhance and beautify their stories with various templates and editing tools. Meanwhile, KlasterMe offers bloggers, photographers, and other content creators a platform to create a page showcasing their content, including images and engaging articles. Both apps are available on iOS and Android and leverage Flutter's single codebase for seamless functionality.
Flutter for Lifestyle
Flutter's consistent cross-platform functionality was a critical factor that led lifestyle apps to consider Flutter. They hire a Flutter developer to take advantage of this framework and develop an app that can provide a native-like experience on both iOS and Android platforms. Additionally, the near-instant stateful hot reloading feature made it quick and easy for developers to experiment with building UI, adding features, and fixing bugs. Here are some examples of lifestyle apps:
Philips Hue
The Philips Hue system is a comprehensive smart home lighting solution offering a range of lamps, bulbs, accessories, and starter kits. Philips has effectively utilised Flutter to develop two innovative apps – Hue Sync and Bluetooth. These apps serve as mobile controllers, empowering users to customise light tones and synchronise their lighting with media devices.
Since adopting Flutter in 2018, Philips has demonstrated a solid commitment to the platform, recognising its exceptional suitability for their projects and leveraging its capabilities to enhance their customers' experiences.
Reflectly
Reflectly is an outstanding journal and mindfulness app powered by artificial intelligence.
Users can document their stories in a personal journal, receive daily thought-provoking questions to reflect on their day, access advanced statistics, and receive personalised, actionable insights, all presented in a beautifully designed interface.
Flutter for the gaming industry.
The gaming industry has increasingly adopted Flutter, Google's UI toolkit for building natively compiled mobile, web, and desktop applications from a single codebase. Flutter's efficient development cycle and hot reload feature have empowered developers to iterate rapidly, creating immersive and responsive gaming experiences across multiple platforms.
Its rich set of customisable widgets and robust rendering engine enables developers to create visually stunning, high-performance games seamlessly. Furthermore, Flutter's compatibility with iOS and Android platforms allows game developers to reach a wider audience and streamline the development process, ultimately creating innovative and captivating games within the gaming industry.
Dream 11
Dream11 is a massive platform in the fantasy sports industry, attracting over 200 million users to the exciting world of fantasy gaming. On this platform, users can create virtual teams of real-life players from various sports, such as cricket, kabaddi, and football. By strategically choosing players and forming teams, users can earn points based on their actual performance in live games, with the potential to win cash prizes.
PUBG Mobile
The PUBG Mobile team strategically utilised Flutter's cross-platform functionality to create an app with a unified codebase for both platforms. This approach streamlined the development processes and resulted in significant cost savings. Executing Flutter's hot reload feature also accelerated the pace of development by providing instant previews of code changes.
By embracing Flutter, PUBG Mobile enhanced its social and community aspects, improving player engagement while maintaining excellent performance. PUBG Mobile's successful integration of Flutter for these features has positioned it as a prime example of leveraging Flutter to enhance mobile gaming experiences.
Flutter for Google Products
Google Classroom
Google Classroom switched to the Flutter framework after successfully implementing GPay. This latest update has significantly improved the app's performance and efficiency. By reducing the size of the codebase by two-thirds, the application is now more streamlined and
user friendly.
Google Ads
Furthermore, the Google Ads app for Android smartphones empowers users to access campaign statistics and receive real-time alerts and notifications. It also provides the capability to connect with Google experts, act on suggestions to enhance campaigns and manage keywords by adding, editing, or removing them.
Flutter for Retail Apps
Flutter is well-equipped with a wide range of widgets, tools, and features that simplify app customisation to align with brand guidelines. These qualities make Flutter the perfect choice for creating retail apps. Here is an example of a retail app developed with Flutter.
Grab-Food and Grocery delivery app
“Grab” is a prominent food and grocery delivery app known for its efficient home delivery service. The app harnesses the power of the Flutter SDK to build a merchant application tailored for hotels and restaurants, empowering them to showcase and sell their offerings online.
Through a seamless and intuitive interface, restaurants and hotels can effortlessly update menus, handle online orders, and monitor their earnings. This innovative technology allows local businesses to broaden their Grab customer base without needing extensive technical expertise.
Is your Flutter app next on this list?
The featured blog highlighted that Google's Flutter is revolutionising the mobile app development landscape. Its potential favours top app development companies, particularly those working on multiple platforms focusing on quick turnaround and go-to-market strategies. Furthermore, it has been observed that Flutter streamlines the development process and leads to money, resources, and time savings.
Looking ahead to 2025, the number of Flutter app development companies in the USA is anticipated to rise. Due to its remarkable features and capabilities, Flutter is positioning itself as the go-to framework for companies. Flutter will soon lead the mobile app development market with continued enhancements.
The common denominators among these successful apps are their swift development process, user-friendly design, and precise rendering. The comprehensive list of popular apps underlines Flutter's versatility for developing various apps: entertainment, lifestyle, social networking, health and fitness, retail, gaming, e-commerce, m-commerce, finance, and more. So, after this, is your Flutter app next on this list?