What is Flutter and Why Use Flutter for App Development

In 2015 there was no Flutter, but there was a so-called browser war. Developers of Chrome were thinking about how to optimize their browsers. This led to the team deciding to cut CSS out of the browser engine—which showed a very big increase in performance.

Realizing that it was necessary grew into what we call Flutter now. In our article, we’ll cover topics such as what Flutter is and when and how to use it for building beautiful applications in a short time.

Google chooses Flutter development for Google Pay, Google Classroom, and other services. Moreover, 23% of apps in the Google Play Store and 14% of apps in App Store are based on Flutter, and this number is increasing at a high rate. Alibaba Group, eBay, Groupon, and other popular e-commerce providers use Flutter as well to give their web and mobile applications uniform looks.

How Flutter Works: Widget Strategy and Dart Programming Language

So, how does Flutter work? The Flutter, written in the Dart programming language, consists of the Flutter framework, the Flutter engine, and the Embedder. Development with the Flutter technology is characterized by its declarative UI approach. Here, there’s a need to start from the end, meaning before starting the development of some element with the Flutter software, the user needs to have in mind a complete picture of what kind of UI it will be. Many developers distinguish this UI writing as a more clear one.

What Is Flutter and Why Use Flutter for App Development?

The main idea of Flutter is that developers can build the entire user interface by simply combining different widgets. The application interface consists of various nested widgets, which can be any UI element. This applies to anything from buttons to padding, and by combining widgets, the developer can customize the application significantly. Widgets are important elements of the user interface and comply with the design specifications of Android, iOS, and conventional web applications.

With Flutter, developers can create custom widgets which can be easily combined with pre-made ones. In addition to this, developers can use a variety of libraries that were written by other developers and published on pub.dev.

Flutter also provides developers the ability to view widgets in a reactive style. Flutter isn’t the first to do this, but it’s the only mobile SDK that offers a reactive look without the need for a JavaScript bridge. Moreover, Dart comes with a repository of software packages to enhance the capabilities of applications. For example, it offers several packages that help to access Firebase so that developers can create serverless applications.

Benefits of Flutter

So what about Flutter’s advantages and disadvantages? When it comes to developing applications, developers are not restricted to a single cross-platform mobile framework. In fact, statistics show that 9.4% of developers use Flutter (in particular, it’s in 11th place among all frameworks in the world, overtaking React Native).

Let’s take a closer look at Flutter’s pros and cons and explain why Flutter application development can be a better choice.

1. Quick code development 

Flutter’s creators wanted to invent a technology with the quickest opportunity to deliver a great-performing, cross-platform mobile application. This is made possible by the following features:

• Hot reload. One of the most important advantages of Flutter is its hot reloading that helps save time during development by letting the developer see the applied changes in real time. This capability helps developers be significantly more efficient and productive. Flutter’s hot reload works better than competitors’ similar features. It allows the developer to pause code execution, make changes to the code, and continue the code from the same place. This greatly speeds up development and allows more experimenting.

Hot Reload Operation

• Widgets. One of the most significant benefits of Flutter is how it uses ready-made widgets. This ensures that Flutter offers a consistent model for development and design. Widgets are Google-based, so they’re high code quality and perform better than other open-source frameworks. As most of them are extremely customizable, they save developers’ time like no other framework. In addition to the major layout widgets, Flutter widgets follow both Google’s Material Design and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, which is a huge advantage.
• Minimal code and access to native features. Flutter helps make developers’ lives easier through its third-party integrations and native codebase. With Flutter, developers can access native features.
  
  

This is what makes quick code development possible, thus making the whole process faster, easier, and less disturbing.

2. Great UI

Will Larche, Software Engineer at Google, says, “Flutter’s architecture is designed for building beautiful, custom UI. Flutter’s main goal is to make building polished, custom app interfaces a faster, more delightful experience for designers and developers. Flutter is powerful enough to draw anything designers dream up.”

• Beautiful, custom design. Flutter allows users to develop applications with custom designs, which will look equally good on iOS and Android devices. Applications developed on Flutter—unlike its competitors—have no risk that there will be UI failures when updating the software.

Reflectly App Attractive Design Made on Flutter

• Same business logic and UI. The ability for Flutter to share the UI and business logic on Android and Apple devices allows developers to achieve a seamless experience regardless of the OS. This is primarily important for brands with a unique and outstanding corporate style. Flutter doesn’t need any platform-specific UI components to render its UI. The one and only thing Flutter needs to show the application UI is a canvas to draw on. This can be illustrated in the following way:
  
  
• UI customization potential. A huge advantage of Flutter is its ability to customize everything you see on screen, regardless of the complexity of the element. The amount of effort required is fundamentally lower than that required on native platforms’ development software.

  

Why Choose Flutter on Your Next Project

“Why Flutter?”, you may ask. In a nutshell, there are things that are of great value to the business—platform stability, its performance, a guarantee of successful support, and improvement of technologies and products. Any problems and shortcomings in any of these aspects may lead to risks, including direct and indirect financial losses.

With this in mind, is Flutter good for your project? In general, Flutter can lower risks for your business due to the following points:

1. The best in class (cross-platform) performance and resource consumption due to the compilation of native code and high-performance rendering engine. The first provides an easy way of establishing communication between platform-native code and Dart through platform channels. Thus, developers can implement anything that a native app can do into a Flutter app, just with a little more effort on the native side. A UI built in Flutter can be launched on virtually any platform, assuming this platform supports Flutter. Putting it differently, developers no longer have to adjust the UI to transfer it to a platform, which simplifies the development process vastly.

2. A good UX is incredibly dependent on the performance of the application. Flutter application performance in most cases will be indistinguishable from the native application. This is because Flutter doesn’t rely on intermediate code representations or interpretation. Applications built with Flutter are compiled directly into machine code, eliminating any performance errors during the interpretation process. This provides it with the highest performance and makes it the most resource-saving software among cross-platform technologies.

3. Better developer productivity is achieved due to Flutter being primarily designed for quicker code writing. It consists of ready-to-use widgets, its syntax requires less code to be written, and hot reload speeds increase the search and correction of bugs. All this results in fewer man-hours for developers. Also, finding Flutter engineers in 2025 is not a problem—the community of fans is growing, especially among Android developers. According to Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey, 60.6% of developers love to use Flutter and have expressed interest in continuing to develop with it. This puts Flutter among the top 10 of favored frameworks.

4. Quicker time to market. Due to the greater productivity of Flutter developers, it takes less time to create an application, which means that compared to other programming languages and frameworks, applications in Flutter are written more quickly and enter the market earlier with equal effort. Thus, the less coding and support effort needed, the quicker the time to market.
5. Low-cost app development. Flutter provides more efficient development work and, accordingly, the ability to develop an application with fewer man-hours.

“Getting started with Flutter was truly awesome. The huge power and productivity you get with instant stateful Hot Reload was mind-blowing,” says Jacob Kristensen, Co-Founder of Reflectly.

Flutter’s Downsides

While Flutter has a lot of benefits that businesses can take advantage of, there are some areas in which it still needs work.

• Lack of some specific third-party libraries. While Flutter is still a newer technology and can boast a large number of third-party libraries, they may lack some features that your app needs.
• Large file size. Many, if not most, of the apps developed through Flutter are destined for mobile devices only. Although current mobile devices have large storage capacities, file size is still important. For example, the creation of a Hello World app in Flutter could account for 4.7MB to 6.7MB. The same app created in native Java is closer to 500KB.
• New skills required. While Flutter is easy to use and can be learned by non-programmers, it does require developers to learn Dart first. This adds an additional phase of learning, which can increase the time and money for any project. That being said, if a developer knows Java/C#, he or she can easily upskill to Dart. Moreover, Dart is easy to learn for those with little programming experience.

If you decide Flutter is your solution after reading the material above, check through the points when Flutter perhaps should not be your choice if you are:

• Creating an app with rare native libraries
• Developing instant apps (small-size apps)
• Having a lot of point interaction with the device hardware
• Developing AR/VR apps.

Apps Built with Flutter

Although Flutter is young enough, it’s already used by such global services as Google Ads, Alibaba, AppTree, Reflectly and many others.Nubank has also chosen Flutter for app development. Nubank is the largest digital bank in the world outside of Asia, so, with over 20 million customers, they could easily see the benefits of unified app development.

As for the question, “What type of app development is Flutter good for?”, the answer is quick and simple—any. You can use Flutter for mobile app development for any purpose—from small businesses (online stores, banks) to large ones (contact centers, courier control, organization of internal processes). However, Flutter mobile application development is the best option for startups and R&D projects, primarily because of its ability to prototype and check business ideas quickly.

The NIX team also has experienced cases of mobile app development on Flutter, so let us showcase one case of NIX’s expertise in Flutter mobile app development—a Meeting Room Booking App:

The client—a large enterprise with about 2,000 employees offering insurance services—had a web version of their app that required an update and approached NIX to create a co-working space management Flutter mobile app for iOS and Android at minimal cost. We proposed a cross-platform solution implying Flutter application development to cover both the client’s and users’ needs.

Two months after starting this Flutter app development project, the client received a multifunctional booking and scheduling Flutter app for co-working spaces.

Flutter’s Popularity and Perspective

Is Flutter popular? Generally speaking, Flutter’s popularity is easy to understand—half a million developers use Flutter monthly, and the top five regions of Flutter developers are the US, China, India, Brazil, and the EU.

In 2021, Flutter expanded its capabilities to web, allowing developers to run Flutter applications in a browser in a clean form without changing the source code. This means that with Flutter, developers can go further beyond app development on mobile. Moreover, this marks Flutter’s transition from a cross-platform mobile application framework to a full-blown cross-platform development tool. Now, knowing how popular Flutter is, you can make an informed decision whether it’s suitable for your project or not.

Flutter 2024 Major Updates

Flutter’s creators are not resting on their laurels. They are continually innovating and improving Flutter to make it a more useful and powerful tool for developers. Some key improvements that are worth calling out in 2024 are:

• Improved performance of graphically intensive applications. With the integration of the new Flutter Impeller API, developers can build mobile solutions with smooth animations. In particular, the implementation of the Impeller API opens up new graphic possibilities, allowing them to implement new effects thanks to high-speed rendering.
• Expanded and updated Human Interface Guidelines widget catalog. With the addition of 37 new widgets to the catalog and updates to existing ones, it becomes easier for developers to design iOS applications, which means they can now implement the most complex UI designs without a negative impact on the performance and usability of the application.
• Swift Package Manager support. Another benefit is the support of Swift Package Manager, which is important for iOS apps and makes it easy to integrate Swift libraries into Flutter projects due to centralized dependency management.
• Embedding multiple views in web applications. The updated version of Flutter makes it possible to embed multiple views to provide flexibility and scalability of Flutter-based web solutions.
• Optimized platform integration. The latest version of Flutter allows native APIs to be used across multiple platforms, including macOS, Android, and iOS, making it easier to integrate with existing apps and libraries.

How to Get Started with Flutter

Now, it’s time to present an intro to using Flutter so you can assess its capabilities on your own.

To get started with Flutter, you’ll need to install the Flutter SDK, which you can download from the official Flutter website. After installation, you’ll need to make sure that this process was done correctly—to do this, simply run the flutter doctor command.

Since the entire interface structure in Flutter is built on widgets, you’ll need to get acquainted with how the main widgets of this framework work (here, we primarily mean Container, Row, Column, Text, and Image). To understand the main principles of their operation, you can start by creating a simple screen on which you can test their various combinations, properties, and principles of interaction with each other. In general, this small preparation for working on a full-fledged project will help you understand the principles of Flutter functioning.

Now, after you’ve mastered the basic widgets, you can start creating navigation between screens. Here, Navigator will be useful—it allows you to determine the structure of your future application (up to creating sophisticated multi-level routes).

Finally, it’s time to explore libraries and plugins—they’ll help you extend the functionality of your project without having to develop each individual feature from scratch. The ones that developers use in almost every project include provider, as well as various plugins for working with Firebase, animation, and interaction with native capabilities of user devices.

If your application includes complex business logic, operates with large amounts of data, and/or implies high user loads, you’ll also have to pay attention to performance optimization. It’s important to note that Flutter offers extremely convenient tools for this (like DevTools), with which you can check the performance of your project and identify bottlenecks in it. As for testing, in addition to the aforementioned hot reload, there is rich functionality for unit testing, widget testing, and integration testing (in particular, here, we’re talking primarily about flutter_driver, a tool that helps check the full user flow).

The last thing in our Flutter introduction is to prepare your application for launch—for this, Flutter has the functionality to build APK or AAB files for Android and IPA for iOS. Also note that this framework supports CI/CD, which means you can fully automate the testing and deployment processes.

Conclusion

As you can see, Flutter is one of the most innovative mobile technologies on the market right now. For businesses looking to create applications on both iOS and Android, Flutter is a great option. If you’re seeking apps with amazing UI and high performance—Flutter is the best option as well.

Flutter is not a universal remedy for everything, but it is a 100% promising framework, considering the breadth of coverage and speed of implementation. If you are looking for a team of Flutter experts, trying to decide whether or not Flutter is the best option for you right now, or have any questions left after reading the article—our specialists are ready to consult with you on all these topics.

At NIX, we have experience developing mobile software applications, and our team of Flutter application developers can work with you to ensure that your Flutter app dev project achieves your objectives. We understand not just the Flutter mobile development technology but can also help you design the right Flutter mobile product based on what you’re trying to accomplish. Regardless of the complexity of your Flutter application, we have a team of Flutter mobile developers capable of building you a suitable app on Flutter, whether it’s a Flutter mobile app or any other solution.

FAQ on Flutter App Developemnt

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When was Flutter released and who made Flutter?

To answer the question, “When did Flutter come out?”, let’s recall that the Flutter release date is December 2018. As for the question, “Who created Flutter?”, here, things are simple: it was created by Google in response to the need of developers for simple and convenient tools for the cross-platform development of applications on Android and iOS. The first release, Flutter 1.0, immediately showed the potential of this framework, which later became the standard for quickly creating high-performance mobile applications. To this day, Flutter continues to evolve, releasing updates with new features and improved performance.

02/

What is Flutter and what is Flutter app development?

Flutter is an open source, cross-platform application development framework that allows project teams to create mobile, web, and desktop applications on a single code base. The one and only Flutter language is Dart (it’s type-safe and has simple syntax and high performance), which was also created by Google. With the Dart and the Flutter SDK, developers can build a native-like Flutter app. Overall, Flutter app development makes the process of working on cross-platform projects convenient, cost-effective, and fast.

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Why is Flutter popular and is it worth using for app development?

When answering the question, “Is Flutter good for app development?”, it’s worth mentioning that Flutter is considered a one-size-fits-all framework because it opens up extensive cross-platform capabilities for software engineers, thereby reducing the costs of creating separate native versions for the Android and iOS platforms. Since program code written in Flutter has high performance, and the framework itself, judging by the positive Flutter reviews from developers worldwide, is flexible and free when choosing third-party tools, it’s safe to say that Flutter is in high demand these days and, in general, the Flutter market share is colossal.

04/

What language is Flutter in?

When answering the question, “What language does Flutter use?”, we’d like to mention that this framework is written in only one programming language, Dart, which, like the framework itself, was developed by the Google team to achieve improved performance and accelerated development. But what language is Dart? It’s an object-oriented language with classes and mixin-based inheritance. Also, it’s worth noting that this language has lightweight syntax, identical to JavaScript and Swift. Thanks to all these advantages, this language allows developers to quickly create an easy-to-manage application architecture, including rich animations.

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Is Flutter free and open source?

Yes, Flutter is absolutely free and distributed under an open source license, which means that any developer or company can use it without paying for licenses. Moreover, any developer can suggest changes to Flutter’s SDK code. This model makes this framework convenient and attractive for various types of projects, from startups to enterprises.

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What is Flutter development and what does Flutter development require?

Flutter development implies installing the Flutter SDK, learning the Dart language, and properly using the framework components to build interfaces. With this knowledge, a developer can build Flutter Android and iOS app interfaces similar to those we can see in native Android and iOS solutions.

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How does Flutter work on Android and iOS platforms?

In a nutshell, this is the answer to the question “What is a Flutter app?”. Generally speaking, Flutter applications are developed using the same code. This framework also independently renders graphics and animation on Canvas, which allows the interface to work smoothly, regardless of the platform on which the program code is running. It’s also worth noting that with each Flutter update, Google improves support for all compatible operating systems, adding new features and improvements.

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Is Flutter suitable for developing commercial applications?

Yes, Flutter is ideal for commercial applications due to its scalability and cross-platform support—ultimately, these characteristics ensure a quick launch of a software solution to the market. Also, Flutter applications easily adapt to changes due to a convenient architecture. Thus, we can conclude that Flutter helps businesses reduce the cost of developing individual versions of the application and allows you to release updates simultaneously for all platforms.