A Perfect Manual for Enterprise App Development with Flutter
Since its inception in 2018, Flutter has shipped over 400,000 applications to millions of devices. Flutter is well-known for addressing issues like stability, performance, development cost, security, and time to market. Flutter came into the limelight and made the app development process easier for everyone.
Let’s dig deep into Flutter app development.
What is Flutter?
Before forging ahead, let me tell you what exactly is Flutter. Put simply, Flutter is a portable UI software development kit for building attractive applications for mobile, web, and desktop with a native-like experience. It is free and open-source across the world and has the property of code share ability. Google introduced Flutter to create cross-platform applications.
The thing that makes Flutter different from alternative SDKs is that it isn’t dependent on web browser technology and neither requires a JavaScript bridge. Flutter uses its high-performative rendering engine that can re-render UIs at a speed of 60 fps (frame per second).
You need to know this about Flutter
Statista has recorded the continuously increased popularity of Flutter over the years. As a cross-platform development framework, Flutter gained 30% (2019), 39% (2020), and 42% (2021) share of respondents in the past years. It is expected that Flutter might cross this bar of popularity in 2022 by 50% share.
So, the question arises why Flutter is famous among app developers.
Google’s cross-platform app development framework supports C, C++, and Dart programming languages. Most of the Flutter app developers prefer to work with Dart. Dart is an object-oriented programming language developed by Google. Kotlin has ruled mobile app development for ages but Dart is now replacing Kotlin by eliminating the need for XML and JSX. Dart boosts Flutter performance with a Just-in-time compiler and object-oriented functionality.
In 2020, 5,00,000 Flutter app developers used the Flutter SDK exclusively, says a survey done by Google.
Your organization should proceed with Flutter, a popular cross-platform app development framework portrayed below.
1. Single Codebase:
Flutter supports code share ability that allows writing code only once for all devices (mobile, web, and desktop) with a native-like experience.
2. Hot Reloading:
One of the best features in Flutter is Hot reloading which lets developers quickly build UIs and fix bugs. The moment any change is made in the code or a bug is fixed, reflected changes can be seen on the devices, without running the application afresh.
3. Widget Tree Structure:
The widget tree in Flutter is an actual tree data structure and a never-ending chain of child and parent widgets that eventually create the visual layout on the screen. It’s a structure that shows how widgets are organized.
4. Pixel Rendering:
Flutter uses its 2D rendering engine that can launch UI virtually on any platform and eliminates the need to adjust UI for a specific platform. Consequently, the app development process gets easier and swifter.
Why Use Flutter for Enterprise App Development?
Apart from the thing, how efficient Flutter is? But is it okay to build Enterprise applications with Flutter? Read below to know a true answer to this.
One perception about Enterprise applications is that these apps only belong to large-scale businesses. Well, this is not true. Enterprise application is a scalable, complex, component-based, and indispensable large software system platform that is designed to operate in a corporate environment. Regardless of the business size, Enterprise applications (EA) are suitable for every business.
Admins with enterprise applications have a commanding position over managing data centrally, executing event-driven approaches, and initiating process-wide automation for an organization. These apps eventually increase efficiency and productivity through excessive functionalities.
Flutter encompasses more than 4000 libraries and an open source community to support and that makes Flutter the best fit for large-scale enterprise app development.
Before moving forward, let’s understand the basic requirements for enterprise mobile app development that Flutter can fulfill.
1. Layered Architecture for Proven Efficiency:
An enterprise application involves a layered architecture of multiple interconnected layers for better implementation of the presentation layer, service layer, business logic layer, and data access layer. A developer needs to establish the following requirements while building a layered architecture.
a. Straightforward documentation of validated codebase
b. Better navigational and intelligible app features
c. Enterprise-wide team communication and cooperation
d. Accessibility to well-defined app design and development requirements
2. Mobile App Development Environment:
The most attractive feature of Flutter is the native-like experience for applications. To ensure a native experience, Flutter offers great agility by integrating with IntelliJ, Android Studio, and Visual Studio Code. These IDEs support all available types of computation devices. Flutter provides an immense set of libraries to make the app development and maintenance process effortless.
a. You may extend Flutter app’s functionalities and supportability by importing Dart packages with extended libraries. The Dart ecosystem of Flutter makes it possible to refactor the applications for an easy transition to another platform, like cloud.
b. Flutter widgets are super compatible with all crucial app tests – Unit test, widget test, and integration test.
c. Flutter uses Native toolsets with enterprise CI/CD setup for faultless app deployment on App store and Play store.
3. User Interface:
Accompanying a better app architecture, Flutter supports functionalities of material widgets for Android OS and Cupertino widgets for iOS to create a powerful User Interface. Flutter accommodates numerous libraries to create a user-attentive interface like Flare for animations, EndlessPaginationListView, and EndlessPaginationGridView for infinite pagination.
4. Hardware Requirements for Faster Processing:
Building a feature-rich application isn’t enough. Proper hardware optimization is equally or more important. If you build numerous features and it doesn’t run smoothly on a mobile device, what’s the use of such an app then?
Flutter lets you create a hardware-optimized application. Common hardware accesses like location, camera, microphone, contacts, biometric authentication, gyroscope, etc can be easily achieved by Flutter.
5. Mobile App Security:
There’s one thing that nobody wants to risk, and that is security. Nobody wants someone to access or look into the data which is secured on their device. Flutter understands the urge for secured applications and never lets malicious intentions enter the fences.
Additional Enterprise App Development Demands That Flutter Meet
Apart from security, better user interface, and cross-platform launch features, Flutter enterprise app can be tied up with the following requirements:
a. Sentry library helps developers effortlessly diagnose, fix, and optimize the code performance whilst tracking errors at the same time.
b. Adobe and Firebase Analytics tools are integrated and supported by Flutter libraries.
c. Developers can access custom libraries and third-party build libraries while working with Flutter.
d. Functionalities like QR code generation and scanners that belong to advanced levels of functioning can be achieved by Flutter.
e. Flutter custom libraries can help you implement features like receiving OTP SMSs, in-app and cross-app sharing with user accounts, managing and creating personal contact lists, etc.
Enterprises that Adopted Flutter in Massive-Scale Project
First, my question to you is are you aware of any application that has been built with Flutter? Since Flutter is the most-commendable cross-platform app development tool, you must be using any application. Even if you don’t know, there are numerous applications created with Flutter that you use daily.
Flutter allows businesses to bring uncountable technical and user-side functionalities including app performance, creative animation, controlled hardware functions, and much more. Let me give you a few examples of businesses and brands who choose Flutter to create their mission-critical enterprise application.
Final Thoughts:
Flutter’s adoption in enterprise app development has been embraced by all business levels. It has become a buzzword in the mobile app development realm. A single investment in Flutter has led multiple businesses to perform a digital service innovation. The cost-efficient and swift app development process is the need of each business and Flutter fulfills it in an absolute manner.
Build your mission-critical enterprise application today with ChawTech Solutions under a friendly budget and let our Flutter app developers build your dreams from scratch.