Everything we do in our daily routine has a mobile application. The extent of mobile app releases is so high that in February 2022, there were more than 81,000 apps released. These figures are only for the Android (News - Alert) platform.

Considering iOS and Android installations, the total number of apps reaches more than 37 billion. So, there is no denying that every business is looking to capitalize on mobile app popularity. Mobile app development needs a reliable framework that allows enterprises to develop user-centric features.

They help create an excellent customer experience and improve brand value. One such framework is Flutter, an open-source platform for building cross-platform mobile apps with a single codebase. As a result, you don’t need to maintain different codebases for apps deployed across platforms.

But, the real question is, why Flutter? What makes it a worthy contender for your mobile app development? Here are six reasons why Flutter is the right choice for mobile app development in 2022.

First, let’s have a quick overview of Flutter.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is not a framework or library but a complete software development kit. So, you get everything you need for mobile app development. Launched by Google (News - Alert), Flutter is based on the Dart programming language.

Features like hot reloading and native widgets make it an attractive SDK for your mobile app development. Further, Flutter widgets help with an excellent UI experience for your applications. With pre-built native components, there is no need for a bridge to communicate with the native modules rendering excellent UI performance.

These features are just the tip of the iceberg, as Flutter offers more. So, here are some reasons to choose Flutter for mobile app development.

Top reasons for choosing Flutter to develop your app

Designing and developing a high-performance app needs consideration of different UI challenges. For example, there are UI challenges that you can face like,

• Sluggish UI
• Responsive design
• Higher latency
• Consistency
• Higher engagement

Here is how Flutter helps overcome these challenges.

1. Layered architecture

Flutter has a layered architecture. Each layer has specific functionality for enhanced UI performance. The hierarchy of widget-based components in the Flutter has root functions at the top. Further, there are basic widgets that interact with the rendering layers.

It also facilitates the separation of business logic and presentation layer through Flutter Bloc. The Bloc design pattern enables the separation of business logic and presentation layer. Each developer needs to know the application's state at any time. Especially users need to see something on the screen during every interaction.

It means higher engagement, and there needs to be a state emerging out of each interaction. Take an example of the loading state displayed on the screen while data is fetched. Designing your application with a state arising from interactions in the different scenarios is excellent for engagement.

Flutter Bloc helps in managing these states through separation of logic. A layered architecture and separation of logic solve the issues of sluggish UI. Another critical challenge is the consistency of app performance, which needs extensive testing.

2. Ease of testing

Testing is one of the essential aspects of maintaining app performance. Consistency of performance needs testing the app’s behavior to user requests, functionality, and more. Flutter makes it easy with support for automated testing.

It provides excellent testing features pre-built in the SDK. Flutter enables testing of UI units, widgets, and integrations with extensive documentation. Another challenge is reducing the latency of app response to user requests.

3. Improved latency

Flutter provides improved app latency by enhancing the rendering times. In addition, it has a pre-built feature to improve the latency performance called sksl shader caching. As a result, animations of the application can appear sluggish and have higher latency. However, once the shader cache is in action, it makes the animations faster.

You can use the following command to activate the cached shader file.

flutter run --profile --cache-sksl

However, it is a tedious activity that demands going through each app page manually. However, you can automate this boring job through the Flutter driver. A single command is enough to automate going through multiple app pages and generate a new shader cache. So, Flutter has pre-built features that help in improving the latency performance.

However, it depends on the developer’s knowledge of the platform. It becomes essential to hire a Flutter developer with first-hand experience in improving Flutter app performance becomes necessary. Better latency does help improve the user experience. However, responsive design is also vital. Flutter makes it easy to develop responsive apps.

4. Responsive apps

Most cross-platform frameworks use a bridge to compile the code in Javascript and render it on a user’s device. On the other hand, Flutter renders applications by compiling the code on the user’s device natively. As a result, it makes the app responsive and improves the user experience.

Some application use cases need real-time changes in the view part. Take an example of an on-demand application. It requires real-time data presentation on the UI. If it's a ride-hailing app, you need to update the real-time data on a driver’s location.

This is where Flutter’s hot reloading feature comes into play.

5. Real-time changes

Flutter comes with a hot reloading feature that helps keep the application state for making quick changes. Hot reloading allows the loading of code changes in the virtual machine, maintaining the app's state intact.

Once VMs update their classes, Flutter will automatically rebuild a widget tree based on the changes, and it will reflect on the app UI.

Conclusion

Flutter enables mobile app development for different use cases like on-demand, eCommerce, healthcare, etc. Its built-in features and tools allow the development of highly responsive applications. Flutter also enables the implementation of changes in real-time.

So, you can offer an enhanced user experience with advanced features. These are the reasons Flutter is worth your consideration for mobile app development. However, whether it suits your requirements or not will impact the final decision.