There is no golden rule of how you can develop an application without spending a considerable amount of money. Every single product in the market is unique, and hence, there is no universal solution to cut the expense of application development.
Whether you’re resorting to a freelance agency, hiring dedicated developers, or creating the app from scratch by yourself, everything comes with a cost. And why not? Building a quality app requires extensive knowledge, profuse development experience, cutting-edge technologies, and so on.
Fortunately, there are certain frameworks and tools that could reduce the cost of app development without compromising on quality. Flutter is such a framework that has come to the spotlight in a very short time for its efficient performance in web, desktop, mobile, IoT, and embedded app development.
Learn why you should hire Flutter developers and how you can bring down your application development services costs with its out-of-the-box features.
A Short Introduction to Flutter
According to Statista, Flutter is the most popular cross-platform app development framework. The tech giant Google created and released this open-source tool in 2018 to help developers build a single app for multiple platforms using the same codebase. Flutter is very easy to work with as it offers a dynamic user experience and a fast yet cost-effective development process.
Without a doubt, Flutter is a promising tool in today's market. Recently, the latest version, Flutter 3, got released, bringing a range of new and exciting features and taking the developer community by storm.
Here are some of the key characteristics of Flutter using which business leaders or a Flutter app development company drastically reduce the app development expense.
Hot Reloading
“Hot Reload” is a unique feature of Flutter that helps us instantly update code changes without the need to restart the whole app. All the changes reflect the simulator, allowing both developers and designers to quickly view the results.
Native apps take quite a bit of time to implement changes, and you need to build different apps for different platforms. Flutter, on the contrary, injects the updated code into the running Dart Virtual Machine and automatically recreates the widget tree.
This way, you can deliver apps faster instead of investing your time and resources in the development process.
Here’s how the code works on a real-time basis with the hot reload feature:
Code Reusability
This is perhaps the greatest benefit of Flutter as a cross-platform framework. The Dart Virtual Machine has a just-in-time compiler (JIT) that converts program source code into native machine code right before program execution and an ahead-of-time compiler (AOT) that assembles your code before it gets delivered to the runtime environment.
This leads to the usage of the same codebase running on multiple operating systems.
I used the following code and executed it on iOS, Android, and the web:
void main() {
runApp(MainApp());
}
class MainApp extends StatelessWidget {
@override
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
return MaterialApp(
home: MyHomePage(
title: "Flutter",
),
debugShowCheckedModeBanner: false,
);
}
}
class MyHomePage extends StatelessWidget {
const MyHomePage({Key? key, required this.title}) : super(key: key);
final String title;
@override
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
return Scaffold(
appBar: AppBar( // 1
title: Text(title),
actions: [
IconButton(
onPressed: () {},
icon: Icon(Icons.add),
),
],
),
body: Center( // 2
child: ElevatedButton(
onPressed: () {},
child: Text("Next"),
),
),
);
}
}
The final result is the same look for all three platforms:
As you can see, reusing 100% of your code on different platforms and reducing the development time by 50% is absolutely possible. This eventually leads to a reduction in costs.
Declarative UI
Everything in Flutter is a widget. Each stateful widget has a state, and a combination of states, as well as the whole tool, works as a widget tree.
Here's the screen you will get when starting a new Flutter project:
Flutter renders the count text widget as a logical entity and converts it further to a physical entity to display on the UI screen. In the beginning, the text widget displays the defined value as the following function:
UI = f(state)
This equation will create a UI describing the state. Here, the state declares to set the 0 as the text widget.
Now, if you click on the floating action button, the state will change as follows. Flutter creates changes according to its body as said by the setState method.
setState(() {
_counter++;
});
So, the declarative UI of Flutter displays the current state of the widget on the UI and saves a great amount of boilerplate code. If you are able to create the same UI with less code, Flutter reduces app development time and cost.
MVP Development
Flutter is the perfect framework for building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and cost-efficient mobile app development strategies. As it is completely free and open-source, Flutter is suitable for MVP development for a range of advantageous features like flexible user experience, native app performance, less resource requirement, accelerated app development, etc.
Additionally, Flutter is compatible with Firebase, meaning you don’t need to separate backends and do server-side programming to create a simple MVP. All these factors result in building an MVP at the early stage of the development process, eliminating unnecessary features/functionalities, and cutting down the cost.
Shorter Testing Time
Software testing is a crucial phase of the whole development lifecycle that ensures the success of the final product. Since a Flutter app development company uses an invariable codebase to create a single application for multiple platforms, there is no need to undergo all the testing stages.
Flutter provides widget testing to test your application features at multiple levels. It also has Flutter Driver as a separate package to run tests efficiently. Hence, Flutter is a great tool for saving a lot of work for QAs and reducing the overall app development cost.
Wrapping Up
The Flutter cross-platform framework is, without a doubt, the best solution for cost-effective custom application development. There are a lot more benefits to offer to enterprises and developers than risks. Accordingly, its popularity is insanely growing, with industry-leading firms, such as Alibaba, eBay, BMW, and Google Ads, using this tool for their development needs.