Nowadays, the mobile application market is inclining toward an amazing user experience application development process. Users of both operating systems are scattered across the world. Hence, enterprises must be mindful of this while targeting their audience to ensure their brands do not suffer negative consequences. You can build cross-platform apps with Flutter. Enterprise mobile apps are intended for the employees or workers of a specific company to co-ordinate or maintain a smooth workflow. Due to the need for lots of features and high security, mobile apps for enterprises should be developed with robust framework ensuring high performance. But can you build enterprise apps with Flutter? Let us see.
Flutter is a cross-platform, open-source UI software development toolkit with a codebase that offers a schema of functionalities to not only for iOS and Android but also to Windows, Linux, Mac and Google Fuchsia, not to mention the world wide web. Flutter uses Dart programming language to develop applications. It offers feasibility factors like higher productivity time for developers and an equally robust, object-oriented build for applications. Platform specific software development is marked with hurdles like inefficient UI, a quick aging source code, lack of security layers, native functionalities, etc. Applications developed in Flutter bypass these issues easily.
Enterprise mobile apps are designed for employees of a particular organization to co-ordinate or maintain smooth workflow. Each enterprise has a different set of requirements and depending on this expectations from apps changes. When we are discussing mobile applications for enterprises, requirements of mobile app play an important role and should be met. Let us see specific requirements for building enterprise apps and see whether Flutter fulfills these requirements or not.
Know the considerations for building best enterprise mobile apps at- Effective Considerations For Building An Enterprise Mobile Apps
Enterprise apps must have architectures that allow clear separation of concerns into layers to allow for, among other things:
This leads to better productivity across the different expertise levels of diverse developer teams.
Flutter meets this requirement as it provides simple and secure networking for web resources, local storage, access to hardware via library plugins, Sqlite databases, state management, dependency injection, background processing, JSON serialization/deserialization, deep linking etc.
Mobile hardware access permission is common for app. Mostly it is done to facilitate operations like location tracking and document upload. When you develop android app with flutter, you can access hardware components like-
Specialists believe that if not the architecture, the accomplishment of an enterprise application comes down to its user interface. But, in this sector, Flutter stands its ground with functionalities of Material Widgets for Android and Cupertino Widgets for iOS platforms.
UX/UI designers can introduce animations with the help of 2 dimensional vector animation libraries. Also, one can transition between in-app pages. Page transition is an example of how navigation between animated app pages can be achieved for maximizing UI pop. Image loading/caching library provides an easy way to handle various images if the basic image or SVG is not sufficient. Also access to Google Maps and Apple Maps is available.
From all this, it has been seen that Flutter fulfills this requirement too.
Security is very important in enterprise apps too. With the assumption that Flutter builds on the Android and iOS application sandbox environments, each flutter application has the inherent security of native Android and iOS applications, and the ability to securely communicate with other websites through https. Essential requirements like authentication are well catered to with the Flutter application. Simple Auth supports integration with the following authentication providers:
Flutter supports SSL certificate pinning that reduces the possibility of attacks on secure web (https) requests. SSL protocol migrates HTTP to an HTTPS and encrypts end-to-end data. The corresponding SSL certificate helps in recognizing the credibility of the site owner and establishing consumer trust. Hackers have come up with lethal ways to find digital openings by reverse-engineering application code. But, the chances of that are grim with the Flutter Dart Code as the same compiles to ARM binary code. Developers can complicate things for digital adversaries by using code obfuscation procedures.
Apart from the above mentioned requirements, there are some random requirements also. Some of these are as follows-
Third-party/open-source libraries-
You can know the essential features in enterprise apps for employee engagement at- Some cool features in enterprise apps essential for employee engagement.
As flutter is an open-source cross platform framework, you can share app code over the target platforms, android as well as ios. Also, you can share UI code with Flutter too. Hence developers have to write code only once and this helps to maintain consistency over all the platforms.
Flutter uses Dart programming language which is similar to React native and there is no need to use Javascript bridge to give a thrust to the startup time, speed up code development time and improve app performance.
This is one of the best feature for developers because with hot reload they can see the changes in code simultaneously in the app. This saves time and helps to correct errors immediately. Hot reload feature allows immediate bug-fixing, quick fixes of UI errors. Developers and designers can work in sync with Hot Reload to develop the mobile app.
Flutter is developed by Google and have a huge community of more than 1000 developers hence you can look up to customer service and support whenever needed.
With continuous access to native features, Flutter ensures that mobile app has complete native app performance and feel.
The above points clears that, flutter is best for enterprises, startups, tech firms and individual developers that are looking for one-time app development. If you’re still confused about whether to choose flutter or not, consult with Solace experts.