What Projects Flutter Is Suitable For? Top 12 Use Cases
The expeditious rise in popularity could be attributed to the framework’s capability to deploy beautiful projects with the potential to go beyond mobile apps.
As Flutter was announced as officially stable for web, Windows, macOS, and Linux, a business would greatly benefit from the SDKs offerings of feature parity, composability, and near-native performance.
These advantages beg the question: “What can we, as a business, do with this powerful tool?”
Google’s Flutter application development kit offers a complete environment with framework, widgets, and tools that can be used straightforwardly. This allows businesses to roll out products quicker and save on development costs.
For the budding entrepreneurs out there, here are recommended use cases to capitalize on these advantages.
Flutter's mobile and desktop applications
Flutter is well known for its cross-platform technology. However, Google has made it a point for Flutter to be an SDK whose top priority is building fast apps for any platform.
Here's how businesses worldwide capitalize on this rapidly-improving app development framework:
Decentralized exchanges
Speed is the name of the game when it comes to Flutter. One of the best use cases for Flutter, then, requires real-time updates.
A decentralized exchange is the perfect use case for Flutter. The mark of a good utility crypto token allows multiple transactions to be accomplished at an astonishingly quick rate. Theoretically, this information should then be instantly shared across the entire blockchain. All the vital statistics and subsequent prices for a crypto token should be kept up-to-date and accurate.
With Flutter integrating flawlessly with CoinMarketCap's APIs and Google's Material Design Principles, you could build a decentralized exchange taking inspiration from Cryptograph. As they focused on speed and an intuitive design interface, Cryptograph was built to provide its users with up-to-date, on-time, and precise data on over 1,600 cryptocurrencies.
If, for example, a team were to create a fully fleshed-out version of a decentralized exchange, you could theoretically build on top of all these tools to allow transaction validation on your existing application. You would then have successfully created a fully functional decentralized exchange worth millions.
Payment methods
Google has done well in proving the success of its SDK development. Google Pay allows over 100 million users over the globe to pay, save, manage expenses, and more. It's one of the fastest-growing e-wallets available on the market.
To build it, the Google team initially used 1.7 million lines of code between the Android and iOS versions of the app. 1.7 million is an unsustainable number of lines, given that they'd have to rewrite much of it to include new features and country expansion. This called for the eventual migration to Flutter.
Rebuilding Google Pay on Flutter required the company to retrain its developers on a new language, platform, and approach to the user interface. It required them to spend months developing a case that Google would have to heavily scrutinize before they approved. The team leads were spurred on by their belief that the migration to Flutter would prove beneficial in the long term. And it was a spanking success.
The rebuilt Google Pay app was smaller, faster, and cost less to maintain. It also allowed them to reduce their engineering efforts by 70% and the total lines of code by 35%.
If you're looking for a case study to prove why your payment application should be built on Flutter, then Google Pay is the ultimate goldmine.
Journaling applications
Journaling applications require beautiful, intuitive databases that are easy for the user to understand and simple for the developers to add features.
Reflectly has shown that Flutter's widgets are easy to deploy and customize. Despite having only two developers, the team was capable of creating a friendly, mental health companion in only two months.
Aside from Reflectly, PUSH Pro has also taken a journalistic approach to fitness and app development. Capable of tracking every step and packed with features that simplify your every workout, PUSH Pro has propelled the fitness app industry with time trackers, graphs, and even a repetition counter that does all the work of a trainer and workout partner for you.
Smart home interconnectivity
Another example of a project that requires an intuitive and natural base is interconnectivity applications. These projects allow users to customize every internet-connected item in their home.
The Philips Hue app, for example, allows a comprehensive organization, control, and customization for all your accessories in the Philips ecosystem.
Now think about an app like this but without the ecosystem restriction. Think about how useful that would be for everyone and anyone. Think about how easily this could be accomplished through Flutter, a development kit that could speak across platforms and to different devices with ease.
Music platform
Aside from easily customizable widgets, Flutter is also chock full of packages that can prove useful in various functions.
As an example, building a music platform with Flutter will require the use of the flutter_audio_query and audio_manager packages. These will fetch the music from external storage spaces and provide play, pause, seek, and volume functionalities for music players.
Impressed? That's just a taste of the valuable packages you could get with Flutter.
Booking apps
When it comes to booking apps, design is of utmost importance. Aside from an easy and uncomplicated booking process, a booking app project should also feature a beautiful design.
The use of attention-grabbing photos will naturally trigger guests to experience the vacation. Eventually, this encourages the viewer to make the reservation.
One of Flutter's tenets is flexibility. This principle focuses on pixel control and customization. Flutter allows you to build adaptive designs that look great regardless of screen size. Whether it's scrollable banners or animated lists, you'll have the perfect widget you need to execute your vision of a captivating booking and travel application.
On top of that, you need to build your project on a toolkit that will allow you to integrate your project with other hotel property management systems and channel managers. Integrating all this into the backend of your project could be done with Rest API, as it provides simple HTTP calls to perform web requests and communicates with JSON data.
Games
When you're building a game, you want to ensure that it's reliable and that its users can continuously access the game 24/7 nonstop.
This was the problem that Lotum's flagship game, 4 Pics 1 Word, faced before they migrated to flutter. Lotum's reports highlight that they spent half their development time working on troubleshooting cross-platform functionality. As Flutter was neither a native app nor required a separate development team for every platform, it became the obvious solution for Lotum to continuously roll out updates without fear of overriding pre-existing components.
Potential businesses might also want to check out the Flame Engine, a modular game engine that provides a complete infrastructure needed to code playable games. Built by the Blue Fire Team, key features of this package include game loops, effects and particles, collision detection, and, of course, gesture and input handling.
Banking and mobile wallets
Banking applications need feature parity, a streamlined UI, and end-to-end feature development to provide a safe, accessible, and simple banking experience to everyday people.
Flutter brings all of that as it removes the need for specialized teams and answers the call for API stability and testing capabilities. In the world of digital banking and mobile wallets, speed is critical to success.
One must launch a fully-functioning feature that won't fail their users. A successful digital bank will launch this feature before its competitors. And Flutter rises to the occasion.
Just ask Nubank. In just three months, the largest independent digital bank outside of Asia was able to develop and release its new life insurance features. This cut down their initial timeline expectations by over 50%, as developing and launching a new product would have taken them anywhere from several months to an entire year to accomplish.
Just imagine how quickly you could expand your user base as a digital bank if you beat your competitors to the punch every single time.
Social networking applications
Though no one's actively attempted to create a social networking app with Flutter, it's possible to build an entire social networking platform. With perhaps the right marketing and added features, these social networking applications could rival even the platforms built by Meta and Twitter.
You could easily build cross-platform applications through shared Dart codebases.
Because of the rapid development and deployment timelines, imagine how much of the budget one could cut down without the need to build multiple teams to develop the same version of the same application for a different platform.
The sped-up deployment also means that developers could build social media platforms and put out prototypes or viable projects faster. This will allow the organization to showcase its app to the world, quickly iterate, and update the app based on customer feedback.
With over 3.78 billion social media users worldwide, imagine the vast reach and the sheer money the right social media platform could generate.
And it all starts with Flutter.
Flutter's web applications
When Flutter was first launched in December of 2021, Google announced that while Flutter 1.0 may deliver fast execution for the Android and iOS networks, its web development features were lacking. It wasn't until the release of Flutter's next generation, Flutter 2, that the SDK broadened its cross-platform technology to include the World Wide Web. This allowed Flutter's initially app-centric framework to take full advantage of the features that modern browsers offer.
With Flutter 2, you can use the same codebase to ship native mobile applications to almost any operating system and web browser. Google took it a step further by allowing application embedding for cars, TVs, and smart home appliances.
Here are some of the internet's existing use cases for Flutter's Web Applications:
Project management platforms
Use a project management system to build a project system management.It sounds ironic yet these will prove extremely useful to automate the development process.
Supernova, for example, uses Flutter to develop a collaborative web application for designers and developers to import Figma designs and export the code in Flutter.
What makes this platform Flutter unique is its capability to transpose into mobile and desktop applications, should the developer wish to take this path.
Ecommerce platforms
eBay motors and Alibaba have migrated to Flutter – and they've absolutely blown their competition out of the water through shared code and 2x faster development.
For eBay, specifically, the team applauded Flutter for its ability to share code with almost everything across platforms: the UI, domain models and analytics all have similar codebases.
For eCommerce platforms, this capability to reach a wide range of audiences no matter the device they use is absolutely essential. If you couple this with the SDK's capability to integrate with almost any device API needed, then Flutter becomes a no-brainer for eCommerce platforms and those looking to build one.
Spreadsheets
A key feature of spreadsheets is customizability. Through thoughtful planning and consideration, the user begins with a blank sheet and starts carving out a story of data and facts.
To accomplish this, a high level of customizability is needed. You'll also need a design interface that's intuitive yet feature-packed without overwhelming the user. Flutter's widgets accomplish this and so much more.
Through interaction models and input systems that turn into Material components that create visually stimulating and behavioral widgets, one can make a compact spreadsheet system that unfurls into a data juggernaut.
Editors
An online editor should be accessible, team-friendly, and able to export in a variety of different formats.
Rive, for example, has used Flutter to add custom pieces to the program that are feature-building and capable of tinkering and building prototypes of features. Rive has built a platform capable of building animations, interactive graphics, and fluid layouts.
If an aspiring team looking to build the next best online editor is out there, then they'd appreciate how easy it is to add custom pieces and features in Flutter that have never been seen before.
Why do businesses use Flutter to build their apps?
That was a lot of information to cover in a short amount of time, but hopefully, the list we've given has given you ideas for your next project or start-up.
As a quick recap, here's why these projects would do well if they were built on Flutter:
Feature parity
Flutter is a cross-platform toolkit that enables app development for operating systems and web browsers. As they share the same codebase, feature parity becomes a clear benefit.
As a user, you'd expect the same product features to be available no matter how you access it. Flutter makes this easier for the developers to do through platform channels that communicate with the underlying system to generate results in response to specific actions.
Reduced development time
Sharing the same codebase also reduces development time. Building the entire project through widgets and native platform channels that allow your code to communicate natively regardless of the device. This process simplifies development and makes creating updates much more maintainable for the future.
On top of this, having both ready-made and customizable widgets in the palm of your hand makes it easier to build and release a minimum-viable product. Whether it's to test a new feature or launch a new product outright, Flutter significantly reduces development time and upkeep.
High performance
Flutter has made it a point to provide all these features without sacrificing performance. Flutter is the one of the few mobile SDKs that doesn't use a bridge for communication between the app and the platform. Experimentation and time-testing have shown that this generates quicker apps with fewer performance problems.
There are so many more benefits to using Flutter that we've left for you to uncover. But you're likely itching to start your new project right now.
At Netguru, we have decades of experience in developing all types of cross-platform projects and applications. If ever you get stuck or need a team to execute your vision of a Flutter project, feel free to reach out to us here at Netguru.
