After a remarkable success in mobile app development from the start, Flutter is now taking its move to other platform development as well. There are multiple platforms for businesses to offer product or services through an app. These platforms are mobile, desktop, and web. Flutter has been the ultimate choice for developers to build future-rich, innovative, and scalable web apps. In this blog, we are going to discuss Flutter web app development in detail.
In these ever-evolving times of technology, people are becoming more dependent on mobile devices. People prefer to buy stuff online rather than walking to the stores. Moreover, the old era of watching TV for news has also been gone. All this stuff has been replaced with advanced equipment and approaches. Now, you can buy any kind of stuff from online stores like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Shopify, etc. Similarly, you can watch the news on your mobile phone or laptop from any official channel’s website.
Owing to this drastic shift towards online stuff, the demand for mobile, desktop, and web apps has also increased. As a result, a lot of development frameworks stepped into the market. This formed another arena of competition for development frameworks to stand out in the market. Flutter remains one of the best platforms for web app development due to its useful features and benefits. We will be discussing why to choose Flutter for web app development.
Some Prerequisites Before Moving Further
Besides Flutter being the most reliable framework for web app development, there are some prerequisites for creating a Flutter web app. You need to have a strong grip on some basic concepts for developing apps with Flutter.
Here are a few must-haves before you start Flutter web app development:
- A 64-bit, x86-64 based, minimum 4 GB RAM operating system.
- Basic knowledge of Dart programming language.
- You should be familiar with the Flutter framework development environment.
- Any code editor (usually these are Android Studio or Visual Studio code).
- Flutter’s latest SDK.
Why Choose Flutter for Web App Development?
Flutter has several benefits when it comes to web app development. Flutter Developers solely aim for an easy, reliable, and fast development process. And luckily, Flutter offers these benefits at first. Moreover, Flutter enables developers to build interactive web app designs and animations as well.
Let’s dive deep into knowing why Flutter should be your ultimate choice for web app development. I will narrow down the reasons that will lead you to successful Flutter web app development.
1) Great User Experience
Flutter offers developers to create flexible and interactive UI within the framework. You can easily create custom user interfaces using a plethora of widgets. The wide range of widgets allows developers to have creative freedom and help build a UI that perfectly aligns with the audience. Hence, it makes the app’s UX much better.
2) Single Codebase Cross-Platform Development
One of the major benefits that Flutter has is its single codebase operating system. Whenever developers build an app for a particular platform, the client may change its requirements. You might need that app to be compatible with other platforms (mobile, web, desktop) as well. This is where most of the frameworks other than Flutter lose the game. While Flutter operates on a single codebase system which allows you to code only once. The same code can be used for mobile, web, and desktop apps without making any changes. This ultimately reduces the time and cost of app development.
3) Perfect for MVPs
Flutter is a framework that allows you to build a minimum viable product (MVP). An MVP is an unfinished app with minimum functionalities and is intended to gather the audience’s feedback about your app. It is the perfect approach to showcase your app to investors and the potential audience as well. Interestingly, after gathering feedback from the audience, you can remove any error they mention. Or you can also add any most-demanded feature that users may ask for after using the app.
Moreover, you don’t need to do backend development separately for building MVP. Flutter app integration with firebase facilitates developers to store the backend code.
Start Building Your First Flutter Web App
Planning to build a Flutter web app? That’s not a bad idea by the way. In the chaos of launching the most beneficial and ultimately the popular apps in the market, you need to take part as well. Going online and having a business can turn out to be the best decision of yours in 2022 and beyond.
Now that you have gone through the prerequisites and the pros of Flutter web app development, it’s time to step into building the web app.
Let’s start!
Brainstorm an App Idea
Before stepping into app development, you need to have a futuristic app idea. This idea should be problem-solving and or be focused on offering benefits to the users. Your app idea is what all your business relies on. It is possible to build a beautiful app design or architecture and add cool features to it, but if your app idea isn’t beneficial to users, all your efforts will likely be wasted.
So, take enough time to generate app ideas from different platforms. Go to Pinterest, you will find a lot of ideas related to any kind of business. There are several other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. Go to these platforms and search for different terms like “best app ideas for 2023” or “top mobile app trends in 2023”. You’ll probably find some useful ideas from different people to brainstorm a unique idea yourself.
Determine Your Audience
The next step to brainstorming an app idea is determining your potential audience. It is very important to figure out what kind of audience are you targeting. Whether they are women only, kids, adults, or old age people. Make a connection with the audience before moving anyway further. Run different types of campaigns. Create awareness. Organize online events. Create hype. This is how you gain the audience’s interest before they see your app.
As you are developing the MVP, engage with your audience and ask for their opinion. Don’t share the exact app idea with them that you’re working on. Ask about their interest, what issues are they facing, and what they need an app to offer. This will help you solve most of their issues (which are possible) through your app. In case you have already finalized an app idea, ask questions from your audience related to that idea. This might allow you to add features to your app that you haven’t already.
Design and Develop Your App
After you’re done with pre-development approaches for Flutter web app development it’s time for design and development. You need to have a clear UI/UX that would align perfectly with your audience’s type.
“Design is the best way to make technology useful”.
So make sure you come up with an app design that is clean, responsive and appealing to the users. The app’s UI plays a vital role in determining its success. An app that takes time to load, crashes most of the time, and has difficult navigation results in a failure.
As you finalize the design of your app, move towards the development of your app. This is the most crucial part of Flutter web app development because it involves several factors that affect your app’s success. These factors include choosing the right Flutter web app development company and determining the project scope, pricing, timeframe, resources, etc.
Strategize a Marketing Plan
Marketing is also a crucial part of an app development startup. Whenever you’re taking your business online, you need to advertise your business first. A properly strategized marketing plan can lead your business growth to its peaks. Here is the quote that portrays the potential of spending money on your business as a startup .
“Money attracts money”.
The more you spend, the more you get. During your entire struggle in developing an app and managing all the concerned tasks, you should focus on making a marketing plan as well. In such a saturated marketplace, you need to stand out from the competition. Initially, it is only possible through advertising. There are different ways in which you can promote your app to a large audience. It can be influencer marketing, email marketing, app store optimization, landing page, etc. This will help you outshine your app in the competitive market. Consult any digital marketer to have an expert opinion regarding the promotion of your app.
How to Enable Web Development in Flutter Framework?
To start building a Flutter web app, you need to be on Flutter’s beta channel. You can do this by installing the latest Flutter SDK from the beta channel. Or if you have already installed Flutter, you can also switch to the beta channel using the command $ flutter channel beta. Then update the Flutter version with the $ flutter upgrade command.
Now you’re one step far from enabling web app development in Flutter. Run this command and the web development will be enabled:
$ flutter config --enable-webPros and Cons of Choosing Flutter for Web App Development
Flutter is undoubtedly one of the most reliable web app development frameworks. There are some pros and cons to it as well. I’m enlisting all of those here for you to have a clear demonstration of Flutter web app development.
Pros of Flutter Web App Development
- Flutter web supports transitions, animations, and graphical elements rendering.
- It provides comprehensive support for both Cupertino and Material Design UI elements.
- Flutter also supports progressive web apps.
- You can easily embed a current web app within Flutter web.
- Flutter web allows you to manage a large amount of data.
Cons of Flutter Web App Development
- Flutter web has some restrictions to using Flutter APIs.
- You are not able to leverage plugins fully. This directly affects the SEO of your web app.
- Apps built with Flutter web are usually slower. This is because Flutter web is still in the development phase.
- You may not be able to fully leverage the hot reload feature in Flutter web.
Wrap Up
Flutter’s legacy is continued. The competition to build apps is also increasing side by side. Owing to this, the development frameworks are also advancing in terms of features and platform support. Flutter is one of them. Its transparency to facilitate flutter developers is commendable. I hope this guide to Flutter web app development will help you one way or the other.
Lastly, if you’re looking for affordable Flutter web app developers, you can hire Flutter developers from flutterdesk. We have a proven track record of building scalable, real-world, and responsive mobile, web, and desktop apps. You can contact us anytime and our representative will get back to you within 24 hours.
