The advent of the cross-platform app development concept made it possible to reduce development costs. Minimized cost and easy development processes are the key benefits of the cross-platform development concept. It reduces cost by eliminating the need for writing codes for platforms separately, It allows one code base to run on different platforms. The international cross-platform market is expected to get a CAGR hike of 26.1% by 2022, this percentage works out to a massive amount of $127.93 billion, it was $25.9 billion in 2015. There are many cross-platform app development frameworks available such as React Native, Xamarin, Flutter, NativeScript, Node.js, and more.
Every cross-platform framework can offer essential features for different jobs, but Flutter is a bit different from its competitors in some key aspects. Google Ads, Reflectly, Birch Finance, and Alibaba are some of the famous applications built using Flutter. Flutter is an impressive cross-platform framework developed by Google in 2017. It combines the ease of development with native performance across platforms with uniformity and dynamicity. However, the most popular feature of this framework is cost-effectiveness. In this blog, we are going to take a closer look at the cost-effectiveness of Flutter.
1. Hot reload feature
Flutter is known for offering an exceptional time and cost-saving feature called Hot reload. With this feature, developers can make the changes in the code, and very easily the changes are reflected directly in the app. It brings a lot of coordination between developers and designers as smaller changes made can be seen in real-time. As the application size increases, developers are required to make the effective use of Hot reload features. To do this, Flutter has a dependency management system called Pub, it is a package manager with reusable packages and libraries for Dart programming language. It eliminates the need to write unnecessary codes thus results in cost savings.
2. Exclusive Codebase
Flutter has made development simpler for developers, it offers highly expressive and flexible UI components which makes apps interactive and attuned to the business goals. it allows programmers to write code once and use it across different platforms, developers can reuse 90% of the codes. Also, the ease of some codes reduces the time when testing the application on different platforms, which results in time and cost-saving to a greater extent.
3. Widgets production
It reduces the cost associated with the development of an interactive user interface which is the major factor affecting overall app development cost. Flutter mobile app development kit comes with a library SDK of widgets, it also allows you to create extra widgets if needed. To create an effective user interface these widgets play an important role, it enables Flutter app developers to easily customize applications. Application designed and developed with Flutter has an interactive user interface with the reduced cost of development and provides the user with flawless user experience.
4. Reduces testing time
It is essential to perform comprehensive testing of an application to ensure its smooth functioning. If the application is developed for platforms differently, it takes a significant amount of time for testing each version individually. Since Flutter uses a single code base to develop an application for different platforms, it takes less time to test the app. You will have to go through all the quality measures just once, it saves many hours of a quality analyst. As the testing time is reduced, it has its impact on the overall app development cost.
Read more: Advantages Offered by Flutter While Using It for Application Development
5. Easy to create MVP
For startups, it is essential to create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) version of the application to present in front of investors to show the functionality of the app. For creating MVP, Flutter would be a great option, it allows you to create MVP of your app which runs on most of the platforms. Creating MVP is a significant development cost and it can be reduced using Flutter.
6. Reduced maintenance cost and complexity
The apps designed and developed with Flutter does not require extra maintenance cost. Debugging process is easy because of its simple code structure, whenever an issue is spotted, it allows the quality assurance team to find the source of an issue in less time. Its Hot reloading feature reflects the changes immediately thus ensuring easy and cost-effective maintenance of the application.
Conclusion
Many factors make Flutter a cost-effective framework to create cross-platform mobile applications. It cuts application development costs by almost half and maintenance cost by 20%. One of the top reasons behind its cost-effective perception is that It is an open-source framework and allows developers to gain free access to a large number of third-party packages for ads, videos, database, cloud, and more. This not only reduces the cost of development but also effectively reduces the time consumed during the development process. To develop a well-equipped mobile application at a relatively lower cost, Flutter based mobile apps are the best choice for entrepreneurs and organizations worldwide.
About the Guest Author
Piyush Jain is the founder and CEO of Simpalm, an app development company in Virginia. Piyush founded Simpalm in 2009 and has grown it to be a leading mobile and web development company in the DMV area. With a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and a strong background in technology and entrepreneurship, he understands how to solve problems using technology. Under his leadership, Simpalm has delivered 300+ mobile apps and web solutions to clients in startups, enterprises and the federal sector.
