How can teams tackle optimisation without getting trapped in over engineering or needless complexity? The initial step is clearly identifying what your app demands. Certain apps depend greatly on animations, some on data collection and others, on constant navigation and updates. Grasping the performance needs helps you select which optimisations truly matter.
After pinpointing these requirements establishing criteria assists in directing your optimisation approach. Concentrate on methods that offer understanding are simple to implement and do not raise the difficulty level, for the team. Here are a few of them.
Rebuilds happen when Flutter’s state changes. They aren’t intrinsically harmful. When widgets rebuild excessively it significantly impacts performance. As your application expands, you'll find subtrees that rebuild even though only a minor component was modified. While recreating widget objects are not expensive it is when RenderObjects are recreated is when it becomes an issue. This is known as rebuild cost. Avoiding unnecessary work in the build method is a quick way to address this issue.
A straightforward and highly efficient approach is to utilise const widgets whenever feasible. Const informs Flutter that the widget doesn't require rebuilding during rendering. The refactoring is very low as it demands no packages involves no setup time and fits seamlessly into any existing codebase. It only depends on recognising which segments of your UI remain constant. A quick start is to use it on inputs that are compile-time constants.
At a glance, having high-resolution images appears beneficial but as you include more and more with your asset directory becoming larger, your app takes longer to load. Employing large images raises memory consumption and delays the initial frame visible to the user. If assets are not scaled appropriately this can greatly affect performance, on mid-tier devices. A simple approach for images fetched from a network, is caching your images, even just caching the width and height, this avoids downloading the image on every rebuild and dealing with the cost resizing.
Applications depending on lists must optimise them effectively. Employing ListView.builder or SliverList than creating all elements simultaneously prevents loading needless widgets. This ensures smooth scrolling is preserved, when handling thousands of entries.
The build method ought to depict the appearance of the UI yet it’s common to include logic within it. Making network requests performing computations or initialising state can degrade app performance every time the widget is rebuilt.
Shifting this logic to controllers state managers or external classes allows developers to keep the build method efficient and minimise the performance cost of rebuilding throughout the widget tree. We look towards the bloc library for separating our logic from our UI.
Enhancing a Flutter app might appear to involve using tricks but in truth the most effective impact comes from straightforward and targeted methods. Keeping your optimisation approach focused to a key techniques promotes clarity accelerates development and lessens mental strain.
Therefore examine your existing codebase and start by implementing three changes: decrease rebuilds by using widgets improve images and assets and relocate intensive logic out of the build method. Observe how much smoother your app becomes with less effort and enjoy a cleaner and more maintainable Flutter project.
