Flutter for Mobile App Development

Andrew Siemer
Andrew Siemer
June 22, 2020

Building Mobile Apps With/in Flutter

What’s so awesome about Google’s Flutter? Flutter combines the quality of native apps with the flexibility of cross-platform development. One of its biggest benefits is that it supports three platforms officially: iOS, Android, and web (in beta). Essentially, Flutter handles myriad platform differences, like scrolling, navigation, icons, and fonts to provide a seamless and native experience and feel of the app. This is huge, in that it saves development time and saves on costs, and QA while bringing speed and usability to the table. That’s why some big-time brands have switched to Flutter, such as:

  • Google Ads
  • New York Times
  • Realtor.com
  • Square
  • Google Assistant

Flutter: How Does It Work?

Ranging in industries of all different capacities, organizations around the world are starting to rely on mobile app development using Flutter. Flutter handles the complexities of any and all builds while allowing for more functionality. Flutter maintains the native experience and feel of the app, and performs on any platform. While Flutter is relatively new in the development world, it enables developers to achieve almost native performance and the Dart language makes it super easy for developers to make beautiful apps that are intuitive to users.

Flutter: Mobile UI Framework

Google says two million developers have used its Flutter user-interface (UI) framework for building apps targeting mobile, desktop, and the web since it was declared production-ready at Google I/O 2018.

Spring 2020 Flutter Development Stats:

  • 50,000 Flutter-built Android apps on the Google Play Store and 10,000 of those were uploaded in the past month.
  • The top five regions using Flutter are India, China, the US, the EU, and Brazil.

Flutter: Our Mobile App Approach

Inventive recently worked with our Fortune Global 500 Automotive Insurance Client to build their new MVP mobile app using Flutter. Greg Bryant, Inventive’s Head of Engineering, agreed with the client’s request to build on Flutter and has never looked back.

Building Mobile Apps in Flutter

Our Fortune 500 automotive insurance client came to us for help designing and building their mobile app experience in Flutter. In 20 weeks, Inventive succeeded in developing an integrated mobile application that offers insurance customers a fully-connected car app experience while automating multiple back-end functionalities on the business side to scale across business units and vendors.

Working with teams to solve hard technical problems is something Inventive lives for; this opportunity to work on complex integrations and design a robust app serving clients was right up our alley. Our design and engineering teams completed numerous UX/UI iterations and customer experience journeys to ensure this mobile application would help our clients win the competitive edge they desired. We worked closely with the client, making daily decisions and keeping all teams organized, aligned, and productive as we accelerated development and worked to launch the app.

Our UX/UI design team delivered over 300 user screens across the MVP application and our development team delivered over 40K lines of code.

The mobile application is not just a mobile phone app, but also a suite of API calls for storing and retrieving data. Prior to the engagement, Inventive had a great deal of experience in developing APIs and mobile applications. However, this project was slightly different. The client requested the mobile application make use of the relatively new Flutter framework. The Inventive team quickly delved into the increasingly rich set of plugins and tools within the Flutter ecosystem to achieve an app that dramatically enhanced our client’s service offerings to their growing global customers.

The Future of Flutter

Flutter is full of features and it promises a good performance, but it is still not production-ready for certain applications teams will have to assess against the vision and offering they are attempting to build with their mobile app to confirm if Flutter is the best choice to move forward with.

Flutter has become a powerful development framework that can’t be dismissed as enterprise customers develop in it and features and enhancements are continuously released, but its future is promising and it’s already one of the best UI design frameworks available at this time.