We chose Flutter for our frontend framework of choice, and it is part of our preferred tech stack when we work on projects because our clients are SMEs, and they need to deliver more, deliver faster, and deliver well. Flutter offers SMEs the ability to deliver applications on multiple platforms, but only have to invest the time to develop one codebase that has a consistent user experience.
If you want to build a mobile app, one of the first choices you are faced with is whether I need a mobile app for just iOS or do I need an app that also runs on Android, vice versa or both? This is sometimes not clear and does not become clearer until later. You can start with one and build the other later, but this takes extra time as you are developing two codebases and therefore costs more money.
Then you realise not everyone accesses your app on a mobile device; some people would prefer to visit a website instead of installing an app. Guess what… That's another codebase to develop and maintain that takes time and money.
Flutter solves this problem; we develop one codebase, and it can be used to deploy apps to iOS (iPhones), Android on mobile and tablet. It can also be deployed as a desktop application on Windows, iOS, and Linux. Still need a website… Don’t worry, the codebase can also be deployed to the web as a WebApp.
This saves countless hours of development time, but it also saves time in testing as the same tests can be reused across all platforms.
It also means the Shapes team is more adaptable, if people are on holiday, etc, work does not slow down, as our entire team are full-stack developers with experience in Flutter. There is not one iOS team, an Android team and a web team. Our team can move from project to project and only have to understand the business case, not retrain in multiple coding languages and stacks.
Financial benefit is obvious even from the time-saving point of view. If it takes 3 months to build an iOS app from scratch, and then after that you need to spend 3 months building the Android version, and then 3 months building the Web App, quickly your simple project is now 9 months of work.
To add some numbers to that, the average full-stack developer salary in the UK is approximately £60,000. Imagine your project could be delivered by just one person, your 3-month project would cost £15,000, but instead it's 9 months, totalling £45,000. However, it could even be more, as your iOS engineer could cost a little extra, and then your web development takes longer because they ran into different problems.
Flutter solves this problem. The issues they run into developing for iOS are the same as the Web, and they build all of these platforms in parallel, so your cost is the initial 3 months, £15,000, reducing your cost to develop a truly multi-platform product by up to 66%.
Now, think that's your initial development. What happens for maintenance? Well, the same again, all maintenance has to be done across three different codebases by different teams, opening up an infinite combination of different issues in each codebase. The more differences, the more bugs, the more time fixing and therefore more cost.
By developing in Flutter, your initial development is more cost-effective, but also the maintenance going forward is reduced; you fix it once, and it's fixed in all places.
Flutter's hot reload feature is a game-changer for development speed. It allows developers to see changes instantly—within milliseconds—without restarting the app or losing its state. This means when our team makes a UI adjustment, fixes a bug, or experiments with new features, they can see the results immediately. This rapid feedback loop dramatically accelerates the development process, turning what would be hours of compile-wait-test cycles into seconds. For SMEs working with tight budgets and timelines, this translates directly into reduced development costs and faster time to market, giving them a crucial competitive advantage in launching products before their competitors.
The ability to iterate rapidly is particularly valuable for SMEs who need to respond quickly to market feedback and changing customer needs. With Flutter's extensive widget library—offering pre-built, customizable components for everything from buttons to complex animations—developers can build professional-looking interfaces in a fraction of the time it would take with other frameworks. This means SMEs can launch a minimum viable product quickly, gather real user feedback, and make improvements in days rather than weeks. In today's fast-paced market, this agility can be the difference between capturing market share and being left behind.
Flutter ensures visual consistency across all platforms. It achieves this using a complex layered architecture, but effectively, the developer builds the app in Dart regardless of the platform using the Flutter framework for the UI. Then, when they want to run it on a specific platform, the Dart code is compiled to target different platforms by the Dart Compiler into native CPU instructions.
This is technical, but what this achieves is very important for SMEs building their brand representation. Users expect software to behave and look the same when they go from using an app on one platform to another. Think of Netflix, how much would you trust the brand if, when you went on the website, it looked and worked completely differently from when you accessed it on your Smart TV? Unfortunately, SMEs do not have the budget to develop every platform separately and have the manpower required to make sure that each platform that is developed separately follows the same UX exactly. Flutter allows SMEs to have this same consistency at a fraction of the cost.
There are two UI libraries built into Flutter, Material and Cupertino. These libraries are the packages that support Native UI when required. Apple provide design guidelines to keep apps consistent across their ecosystem, and if it is important that your app follow these for your business use case, Flutter still supports this by allowing the code to use the Cupertino version of aspects of code when being used on an iOS device. Google also have their Material Design guidelines for Android, and these are built into Flutter, these libraries have a lot of pre build components that can be used that keep your app consistent with others on these platforms.
Flutter is an open source project that was started and is maintained by Google. This is important so that it gets continuous upgrades that help speed up future development, but also so that security issues are patched regularly. Google have swapped multiple of their services over to Flutter, so it is also in their best interest to continue to maintain and use it.
However, although Google are a large portion of the maintainers of Flutter, the project is open source, and this means that other people are also contributing to Flutter's ecosystem, and it is one of the most popular developer ecosystems for cross-platform development. All of these developers share code and build packages that others can use in their own projects to save time on reusable components that are shared between applications.
This backing by Google, combined with the invested developer community in the open source project, makes Flutter a stable and great choice for SMEs that want to get the most value for money out of their development and reach more markets with their application by releasing it on multiple platforms from day one.
