Building a generic app isn’t enough for businesses to maximize user engagement, retention, and ROI. You need an app that grows with your business to meet customers’ demands and foster trust. Next-generation users expect mobile apps to be fast and responsive as they feel time is money.
That’s why businesses need scalable mobile apps to keep up with the demands of modern users. Here comes Flutter in the picture, a UI toolkit created by Google. This cross-platform app development framework allows developers to develop mobile applications for multiple platforms without consuming much time and money.
However, building scalable applications with Flutter isn’t an easy task. Businesses need to understand the practices and strategies before choosing Flutter app development services. In this blog, we’ll explore the necessary tips and strategies to make your work easier. So, stay with us and keep reading to create a scalable app using Flutter.
Why Should Businesses Choose Flutter For Scalable App Development?
Before exploring the best strategies and practices, it’s important to understand why Flutter is an excellent choice for building scalable applications.
- Single Codebase: Flutter allows developers to write once and deploy on multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, Web, and Desktop.
- High Performance: Flutter works on the Dart language, which has JIT (just-in-time) and AOT (ahead-of-time) compilation, allowing the framework to run smoothly. Prime examples of high-performance are Google Pay, eBay, and Alibaba.
- Flexible UI/UX: The cross-platform development framework has a widget-based architecture that allows high customization, making UI/UX seamless.
- Faster Development: The Hot Reload feature allows developers to see changes in real-time, making development faster than native.
- Large Community & Support: Flutter is a popular framework that is being used by more than 2 million developers. It allows developers to get support globally.
Best Practices To Build Scalable Apps With Flutter
Now that you understand the need to use Flutter, it’s essential to know the best practices. To create a scalable mobile app, you need to follow them properly by investing in Flutter app development services.
- Adopt a Scalable Architecture
A well-defined architecture is crucial to laying a strong foundation for a scalable app. Flutter includes some popular architectural patterns, which are:
- Provider: A simple and lightweight approach for state management.
- BLoC (Business Logic Component): Made for large-scale applications that need clear state separation.
- Riverpod: Developers can choose it over Provider as it eliminates common state management pitfalls, also.
- MVVM (Model-View-View-Model): Allows maintaining separation between UI and business logic, making apps more efficient.
Choosing the right architecture ensures that your mobile app remains maintainable and easy to expand. For a small app, Provider is efficient, and complex apps should be built using BLoC or Riverpod to ensure scalability.
- Optimize State Management
State management becomes crucial to create a scalable mobile app because it affects app performance. Based on your app’s complexity, you can consider these solutions:
- Provider: Best for small and medium-sized applications.
- BLoC: Allows better state management in large apps.
- Riverpod: A flexible and enhanced alternative to Provider.
- GetX: Simple and fast, but can’t be used for every large app.
You need to hire mobile app developers with expertise to prevent unnecessary widget rebuilds and improve performance. With efficient state management, apps can reduce weight rebuilds by 30-50%.
- Modularize Your Codebase
To manage your app properly and make it scalable, you can break your app into separate modules. You can organize your app into different modules, such as:
- Authentication
- Dashboard
- User Profile
- Payment System
This modular approach allows businesses to update or extend individual features without disrupting the entire codebase. With modulation, you can allow different teams to work on different features simultaneously.
- Implement Dependency Injection (DI)
Dependency injection is critical to manage dependencies effortlessly and improve testability. Flutter has some useful and popular DI frameworks, which are:
- Getit: A service locator that makes dependency management easier.
- Injectable: Works easily with Getit for automated DI.
With Dependency Injection, you can achieve better separation of concerns, making your app more scalable. When you implement DI early during app development, it prevents tight coupling and makes testing easier.
- Improve Performance for Scalability
A scalable application needs to be optimized for performance. To improve performance, you can follow techniques such as:
- Minimize Widget Rebuilds: Use const widgets crucially to avoid unnecessary redraws.
- Lazy Loading: Load only necessary data to improve performance.
- Caching: Store frequently accessed data with the help of Hive, shared preferences, or SQLite. You can reduce API load by 40-60% through caching.
- Optimize Animations: Avoid using animations excessively to prevent performance degradation.
You can easily monitor widget rebuilds using FlutterDevTools to identify unnecessary renders.
- Apply Comprehensive Testing
You can’t compromise on testing when you are eyeing to scale your mobile app using Flutter. The testing strategy should include:
- Unit Testing: Validates every component along with business logic.
- Widget Testing: Makes UI elements function flawlessly.
- Integration Testing: Makes different modules work together.
Due to Flutter’s built-in support for testing, this framework makes it easier to catch issues before they become bigger problems. You can automate tests with CI/CD tools to detect issues early.
- Optimize API Calls
Focus on efficient API handling to scale seamlessly. Here are the best practices you need to follow:
- Use Dio, which is a powerful HTTP client for better API performance.
- Implement caching mechanisms to reduce redundant network calls.
- Use pagination to load only the required data.
- Apply powerful retry and error-handling strategies.
Integrating a well-optimized API ensures smooth performance as your app grows.
- Prioritize Security and Data Privacy
You can’t compromise on safety while scaling your application. Security and data privacy play a major role in retaining and increasing your user base. To integrate security, you need to follow best practices, such as:
- Encrypt sensitive data before storing or sharing it.
- Use secure authentication through Firebase Authentication.
- Implement role-based access control to restrict unauthorized actions.
- Always leverage HTTPS to make safe API communication.
Remember, most of the mobile vulnerabilities come from poor API security; that’s why you should use HTTPS to mitigate risks.
Final Thoughts
We have included major best practices to build a scalable mobile app using Flutter. This process requires a combination of the right technology, architecture, and best practices. From selecting a state management approach to focusing on security & data privacy, every step is necessary to ensure that your app can handle growth without disruptions. By partnering with a Flutter app development company, you can get experienced app development services to build high-quality and scalable apps to help you provide a seamless user experience.
