Flutter platform and a Minimum Viable Product strategy are two elements that have been finding themselves a part of every conversation where time saving mobile app development strategies are discussed.
In this article, we are going to look into both of the – now time-tested – approaches together. We will try to establish what makes their combination ideal for startups looking to test the waters before full-fledged app launch. We will deep dive into why startups should look into the strength of Flutter and MVP to initiate their mobile journey. You can know more about flutter and the way it’s setting the trend in app development.
But before we dive into their combination, let us look into the importance of flutter for MVP development process for the app industry, individually.
Table of Content:
- What Makes Creation of an MVP Necessary?
- What Makes Flutter a Prominent Part of the App Industry?
- Why Choose Flutter for MVP development?
- FAQs About What Makes Flutter Ideal for MVP Development
What Makes Creation of an MVP Necessary?
MVP – the basic most version of an app holds a massive prominence in the app industry, especially among startups that are willing to get their idea validated in the market. The idea behind an MVP is simple – develop a version of your app which shows your app’s unique features and share it with the pool of prospective users to gauge what they feel about the offering. The step that follows is working on the app to make it according to the users’ feedback.
In simple terms, MVP acknowledges business owners to validate their idea, gather feedback, and identify customer’s needs. It assists with avoiding market failure and spending money on a product that is not backed up by proper market surveys and research. And the perfect tool for a cost-productive MVP development process is Flutter.
There are a number of benefits that come packaged with the characteristics of MVP some of them are listed below –
1. Testing of Idea at the very start of the road
There’s no ignoring the fact that for an entrepreneur their idea is the best idea – one which comes with the guarantee to succeed in the market. But is this belief in the idea enough to make it a success?
The ideal way to know this is by launching an MVP in the market. The benefit of MVP in flutter is not just to help you get your idea out in the market but on the other side, helps in gathering feedback, doing market research, and improving the app for the future. Through this, an MVP helps in understanding the idea validity and can help save a lot of money that goes in creation of a less-liked application.
2. Reaching Out to the Investors
Getting investors interested in your app idea is not easy. But what helps in getting a leg inside the door is approaching them with a functional model compared to a diagrammatic representation. When you show them an MVP backed by the user engagement graphs, there are greater chances of them getting hooked to your app idea compared to when you give them an idea.
3. Minimal Cost of Development
Something that every flutter app development company would tell you is that the more functionality you add in your application, the greater resources will go behind its development and thus, increasing the MVP development cost.
What it translates into is that as opposed to the cost of full-fledged app development, the cost of MVP will be less than half.
4. Saves Time and Efforts
One of the other main factors why businesses should adopt an MVP beside the perks of low development cost is the lowered amount of effort and time. An MVP enables you to determine if the efforts are getting their anticipated results or not. This in turn, allows startups to use their potential, wisely.
Now that we have looked into one factor of the equation – the benefit of MVP, let us shift our focus to the other part – Flutter.
What Makes Flutter a Prominent Part of the App Industry?
What is Flutter? Flutter is an astounding software development kit introduced by Google a few years back. Relying on the Dart programming language, the features of Flutter were developed to give the industry what was missing in all the previous cross-platform frameworks.
There are a series of primal benefits that come attached with developers’ choice to go with Flutter as an ideal cross platform app development framework. Here are some of them:
Hot reload feature – The changes that are made to the app code are made instantly visible to developers on their screen, which in turn, makes the whole process extremely easy and low time consuming. The feature also allows them to change whatever doesn’t fit inside the application instantly .
Less coding – Flutter SDK makes use of Dart – an object-oriented programming language which is known for its low line of codes compared to other languages operative in the market.
Widgets – comes packaged with multiple widgets which not just look native to Android and iOS individually but also come with scope of customization.
The option of no choice between android and iOS makes flutter the best for the app industry. Android and iOS are used by every individual around the world, and much of the time, the target audience is spread between them. When you want to present yourself in the market quickly with your ideas, you additionally don’t have any idea in picking the target audience to reach. Using Flutter, you can skirt the extreme decision-making process and gain a bigger pool of users and customers to gather feedback.
Flutter lets developers to develop one code and divide it between iOS and Android. In most cases developers don’t require any platform specific code. That way, you can arrive at your intended target audience on both platforms with no additional time investment.
Now that we have looked at the best of what both MVP and Flutter have to offer to the developers and the app industry as a whole, let us move to the part where we will look into what their combination entails for startups – the benefits that can be entailed when you build an MVP with Flutter.
Why Choose Flutter for MVP development?
Being an open source, Flutter complements MVP development. With Flutter increasing the pace of the development process, app development becomes simplified. Also, Flutter’s compatibility with Firebase, doesn’t require you to separate backends for building simple MVP. Rest we can discuss below the points.
1. Creation of Cost Effective Applications
Since the beginning of time, cost limitations have been one of the main hindrances for businesses looking to enter the mobility space.
Flutter comes as a solution for it by supporting the development of apps that get live on both Android and iOS through a single code base. This, in turn, eases the process of working on both the platforms individually, at a low developmental cost.
2. Flexible User-interface
Flutter brings what Google is popular for, and that is the expressive and flexible UIs to raise and enhance the customer experience. Taking an e.g, Flutter owns the built-in widgets for the material design, Cupertino and default animations for normal scrolling, rich motion APIs, and so on.
3. Expedited App Development Process
Developers take very less time to create when they choose to build an MVP with Flutter. The SDK comes packaged with a hot reload functionality that makes it possible for them to view the changes made in app code appear on the screen simultaneously. This, on an overall note makes the app development process fast and easy.
Through Flutter, it also becomes possible to create a close collaboration between the teams’ developers, designers and quality experts, especially when an immediate change is required to enhance the quality of the app.
The hot reload feature that comes by choosing Flutter for MVP application development also enables developers to add new features and fix bugs within minutes. The experimentation process becomes faster, as the new version does not have to be coded entirely.
4. Native Performance
Large budget means to spend extravagantly on applications to build native apps.
Yet, on the off chance if you are on a tight budget plan and want to create hybrid applications, then there is a possibility that most of the framework will compromise with the performance, thus undermining the app’s user experience.
Applications built with Flutter are known for their performance. The developed apps run by natively compiled code without the interference by mediators. Thus, when you intend to build up the MVP of your application using Flutter, it can provide native experience to the users.
5. Flutter Driven Design = Investors’ Attraction
It is extremely important for both businesses and startups to draw in investors to their app idea. Flutter SDK comes with a range of enriched UI features and interactive designs, which attracts investors and customers alike.
It considers every element to be a widget. Through the SDK, developers are able to support both Cupertino and Material Design, which together form an assortment of visual, behavioural, and motion oriented widgets.
What makes Flutter best for cross-platform app development is the fact that it supports a wide range of widgets along with giving developers the option to customize the widgets, as when needed. Flutter also supports 2D GPU accelerated APIs, which makes animations smooth and attractive while helping developers create rich UI and UX.
The app developers get access to several extensive ranges of themes. They can individually design themes for Android and iOS devices, which renders an ideal user interface on the devices. This set of enriched features complement development of highly user friendly and easy to use applications.
6. Flutter for MVP Development = Reduced Resources Requirements
We understand that Minimum Viable Product strategy works with a minimal number of resources. This mixed with the fact that Flutter also comes with Firebase integration, as announced in the Flutter Live Event, makes it irrelevant to do server side programming. This irrelevancy comes in handy when developers have to create apps in less time and have to fasten the time to market.
The integration of Flutter with Firebase leads to the inclusion of several features such as analytics, authentication, hosting, real-time database, cloud functions, crash reporting, cloud storage, etc.
To sum up, here are the things that make Flutter for MVP application development a game changer for startups:
- The process that a flutter app developer follows can be initiated by the developers at the back of a minimum learning curve.
- Flutter SDK comes with the provision of very little coding, for almost all of the codes get shared between iOS and Android apps. This, as a result, lowers the numeric value of Flutter app development cost estimate to a great extent.
- Since Flutter is the brainchild of Google, it provides high reliability and comes with the backing of a massive community support.
- The Flutter app developers don’t require any powerful machinery and can arrange the setup almost seamlessly.
The reasons that back a startup’s choice to go with Flutter for MVP development doesn’t just end at these. The constant additions that are being made in the platform to make it the ultimate cross-platform choice are also backing the decision.
Are you too finding Flutter to be your calling for MVP development? Let us help you. Get in touch with our Flutter app development experts to get started with the inception of your MVP.
FAQs About What Makes Flutter Ideal for MVP Development
Q. How Flutter Reduces the Cost of App Development?
The secret of developing cost effective apps lies in the lowering of the development efforts and time. The lesser the time it takes to develop an app, the lesser would be the overall app development cost charged by a mobile app development company.
Flutter, being a design centric cross-platform app development SDK solves the issue of greater app resource requirement by delivering supreme design and development quality with limited tool-set and manpower requirement.
Q. Why is Flutter the Ultimate Solution for MVP Development?
What makes it ideal to choose flutter MVP architecture development is the fact that it takes minimal time and effort to develop the solution while additionally, the cost charged for the development is also substantially low.
Also, developing an mvp with flutter comes with the added benefit of the delivery of an intricately designed solution.