Flutter For Building MVPs

• By Manali Shah
• 18-02-2020
• Technology

Today, we have over a million mobile applications that enable us to carry out different task. Out of these, over 70% of startup businesses have still failed as a result of releasing product that are not market-worthy due to various reasons; like why they didn’t get the necessary attention which may include one of the following;

• No market need,
• Ran out of capital,
• Wrong development team,
• Pricing got outcompeted,
• Product mistimed,
• Poor business model,
• Customer feeling ignored,
• Failed geographical expansion,
• Legal challenges,
• Lost focus,
• Burnt out,
• Didn’t use network connection, Or unfriendly user product.

What do you think would have happened if such businesses made use of the concept referred to as MVP?
Minimum viable product (MVP) is a development technique in which, a new product or website is developed with sufficient or basic features, which are enough to capture the attention, and satisfy its early customers with a definite solution such that, the final product is only developed after consideration of the feedback from the product’s initial users.
Viability means delivering enough value to users so ensuring viability of the product is one of the key characteristics to a successful MVP development.

MVP is the most pared version of a product that can be released and it must possess the following:

• People must be willing to use or buy it.
• Demonstrate a lot of potential such that it is capable of retaining its early users.
• Provide a feedback system to guide the team throughout its future development.
• Test the demand for the product.
• Gain valuable insight on what works and what doesn’t so you know the problems you can solve.
• Find out which trends you can use when developing the final version of the product.
• Gather and enhance the user base.
• Work directly with clients also critically observing and analyzing their behaviors and preferences.
• Attract investors.

It must have a scalable, cost centric and simple interface, and also a restricted feature set. The mistakes with most companies are some are aware about it and some are not, they carry it out but they overload the features in a bid to “satisfy the customers”.

The more features, the easier it is for the users to lose focus on the core value of a particular product and examine every feature. When an MVP becomes overloaded, it is assumed that is the final product making a company lose and fail. Also filtering the features too much cutting out product key functions is also another problem so it is very important for companies to understand the basic set of features and provide users with a working product so that they can follow the product till it is released finally.

Once you have gotten the attention of your target audience, it is easier to add more features on each new release of your MVP offering a better solution; solving their queries easier, better and faster. A lot of successful companies started with this concept, consider Uber which is widely used in over 50 metropolitan areas worldwide where customers support ride request and a driver keeps them from their current location to their destination used this concept when testing their customer base in San Francisco with a credit card based payment approach.

Are you considering how to go about building an MVP?

Flutter development is a very simple and easy platform that helps developing an MVP for any business. Flutter is an open-source software development kit designed by Google that provides a fast and expressive way for developers to build native application for mobile (both android and iOS), web and desktop from a single codebase. The portable user interface speeds up mobile application development and reduces the complexity and cost of app production across platforms. It is optimized for 2D mobile apps, those that need to deliver brand-first designs, those that look like stock platform apps, and full-featured apps which include camera, geolocation, network, storage, third-party SDKs, and many more.

Flutter is unique because it neither uses Web View or OEM widgets that are shipped with devices; it uses its own rendering engine which has proven to be a high-rendering one to draw widgets.

It has only a thin layer of C/C++ code implementing most of its systems (composition, animation etc.) in Dart (an object-oriented language ) that enable developers to easily to read, review or remove any feature giving them control over the system.
It also comes with a modern framework, inspired by React which is designed to be customized and layered, and also a set of high quality widgets, layouts, and themes. It is very easy to create your own widgets, or customize the existing widgets.

Advantages of using Flutter

Fast development

It is built for high and fast development of native apps, also having a set of customizable features which are built from the modern react framework. It also doesn’t depend on the platform, so it is easier to build an app on various platforms since it has its own widgets and designs.

It takes less time to test since the code base is implemented just once except the apps have some differences on the different platforms.

Hot reloading

Upon hitting the refresh button, every newly written code are implemented as you save so you do not have to recompile each time which usually takes a lot of time. It is a very important tool that takes away the build/ wait/ run/ test/ start-over process when rebuilding as you change assets, plugins so every user interface changes are applied while the app is running. Fixing bugs is made much easier.

Expressive User Interface

It moves to a widget, rendering, animation and gesture in the framework to give developer control over every pixel on the screen, so they have flexibility to build custom design.

Unit and Widget testing

A widget is an immutable description of part of a user interface commonly described as a “blueprint”. Dart is an object-oriented programming language which contributes to the efficiency and effectiveness of development flow. It also has an in-built support for both unit testing for logic and widget testing for user interface or interactions.

Consistent API

Application Programming Interface are set of functions and procedures that allow the creation of applications which access data of an operating system, application, or other services. Once you understand how they work, their functions are consistent all through development flow.

Theming

Flutter has in-built support for theming every aspect of the application UI which is usually very difficult.

Final Thoughts

Flutter is a perfect tool for building MVPs, because it has many advantages for business and mobile app development compare to other tools. It is very useful for building high-performance and outstanding mobile apps which fit your custom needs and requirements, also saving you a lot of time and money. It can be used by new and old developers because Dart programming language is very easy to learn and it has lots of potential.