Flutter: one app for Android and iPhone
A vendor has asked whether you want your app built natively, twice, or once in Flutter. Here is why that choice matters more than it sounds.
· 2 min read · For business owners planning an app
You have decided you need a mobile app, and now a vendor has asked whether you want it in Flutter, or built natively as two separate apps for Android and iPhone. This is not a small technical detail. It changes your cost, your timeline, and how fast you can fix a bug later.
What Flutter actually is
Flutter is a toolkit from Google that lets one codebase produce an Android app and an iPhone app that both look and feel native. Instead of two teams building and maintaining two separate apps in two different languages, one team builds one app that runs on both.
When it is the right choice
- You need both Android and iPhone versions, and most businesses in India do, because your customers use both.
- You want to ship a bug fix or a new feature once, not twice, on two different codebases.
- Your app is mostly forms, lists, orders, dashboards and chat, which covers most business apps, rather than something that needs the newest phone hardware feature the same day it launches.
When it is not the right fit
If you need to use a brand-new phone feature the day it releases, before cross-platform tools support it, or you are building something extremely graphics-heavy like a high-end game, native development may still be right. For nearly every business app, ordering, field staff tools, customer apps, dashboards, neither of these applies.
What it costs you
Building once in Flutter instead of twice natively usually costs less upfront and noticeably less to maintain, because every update is written once and tested on both platforms together. The trade-off is a slightly larger app size and, for a handful of very specific hardware features, a short wait for support to catch up, rarely a real problem for a business app.
Questions to ask any vendor
- Will this be one codebase for both platforms, or two separate ones billed separately?
- Who maintains it after launch, and does a fix need to be written twice?
- Can we see an existing Flutter app you have shipped, on both Android and iPhone?
How we can help
We build in Flutter as our default for business apps, because most of our clients need both Android and iPhone, and one well-maintained codebase serves them better than two. See our approach under services, or talk to us.
