Top 10 best Flutter apps in 2024

Flutter's "hot reload" feature allows developers to instantly see the changes they make in the code reflected in the app interface, significantly speeding up the development process.

Flutter is built around the concept of widgets, which serve as the building blocks for constructing UI elements — from buttons and text to layouts and animations. This approach simplifies UI development and enables developers to create complex interfaces easily.

Flutter's set of pre-designed widgets facilitate the creation of visually appealing and expressive user interfaces. The framework also provides both Material Design widgets (for Android) and Cupertino widgets (for iOS) to ensure a native-like user experience.

Flutter apps are compiled to native code, ensuring high performance and reduced overhead. The absence of a bridge layer between the app and the platform also contributes to faster execution speeds.

Flutter has a rapidly growing community of developers who actively contribute to its growth, resulting in a huge amount of resources, packages, and plugins available, making it easier to address various development needs.

As a product supported by Google, Flutter serves as the foundational technology for both startups building their MVPs and well-established products that scale up. However, in this article, we will focus on the latter, expanding upon the list from the previous year.

In 2019, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, faced the challenge of developing multiple apps that could work smoothly on different devices. They wanted to avoid repeating the same work for each platform, so they turned to Flutter, a versatile framework for building apps that work on various platforms.

By using Flutter, they tailored it to fit their needs and ensured consistent performance across different devices. This switch to Flutter boosted their productivity by 33% compared to their old methods. 

Now, ByteDance has a team of over 700 skilled Flutter developers, with more than 200 actively working on Flutter projects. They've not only used Flutter for popular apps like Xingfuli, Jike, and Xigua Video but also for many other creative projects.

Betterment, an online investment firm based in New York and regulated by the SEC and FINRA, noticed a shift among their clients towards mobile usage in 2019. They promptly decided to adopt a mobile-first strategy, but this change came with its own set of challenges.

Before discovering Flutter, Betterment had to create most of their features twice. So, they began searching for more efficient mobile development methods. Flutter stood out as the most appealing option because it met all their criteria: it made apps feel native, and it supported accessible features crucial for a regulated firm.

It took Betterment's engineers two weeks to learn the basics of Dart and Flutter, create new components for their system, and then incorporate them into new Flutter features. After switching to Flutter, they could easily adapt and modify feature development as needed. They could also develop most features in a way that was compatible across different platforms.

By using Flutter, Betterment was able to deliver more within the same timeframe without sacrificing the cohesive and attractive customer experience.

Tencent Cloud Chat is a simple and easy-to-use Chat SDK. It comes with a UIKit component library and Voice/Video Calls module. It's designed to help users quickly add a chat feature to their apps. This solution is currently the top choice in China's chat service market.

Before using Flutter, Tencent Cloud had to use different tools for each platform. However, Flutter's support for custom widgets and themes allowed them to create unique and visually appealing interfaces that look consistent across all platforms. This enhanced the user experience and increased engagement.

The team also utilized Flutter's hot reload feature, which accelerated the development process. To further facilitate the integration of Tencent Cloud Chat into apps, the team created a Flutter UIKit component library. This library incorporates all the features of the Flutter Chat SDK and can be utilized across iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and web platforms.

Crédit Agricole Bank Polska noticed changes in how customers interacted with their services, relying more on digital channels and visiting branches less. Their old mobile app no longer met their standards, so they decided to create a new one to align with customer preferences.

They chose Flutter because it offered a modern, responsive, and stylish solution that worked well on both Android and iOS devices. Starting from scratch, they built their new "CA24 Mobile" banking app with Flutter. After a year of work, they launched the basic version of the app, which was easier and cheaper to update. This helped them quickly adapt to customer needs.

The challenge of catering to its diverse user base was difficult for Classroom. Before adopting Flutter, developing mobile features for Classroom was complex and required significant effort to ensure consistency across platforms. This resulted in a large amount of code, leading to technical debt.

To address these issues, Google Classroom embraced Flutter. This decision allowed them to share complex business logic between different operating systems and reduce the overall code size. By minimizing platform-specific bugs and addressing technical debt, Flutter enabled a more streamlined development process for the future.

With Flutter, Google Classroom was able to share 98% of its mobile code across platforms. Additionally, features like Hot Reload significantly reduced build times, saving developers valuable time. Overall, Flutter helped the platform save up to a week's worth of work per engineer per quarter.

In 2020, Skandia, a financial services company, realized that their mobile banking app was falling behind competitors in terms of features and performance. The gap between their Android and iOS apps was widening, making it hard for their small team of seven developers to keep up. The app's outdated and non-scalable codebase made it difficult to add or improve features.

After considering various options, including sticking with native apps, the team decided to explore cross-platform frameworks.

Using Flutter, the team rebuilt the app from scratch. They found that Flutter's flexibility allowed them to create a desktop version of the app for internal use with over 90% of the features from the mobile app. Flutter helped Skandia catch up to their competitors by improving the app's quality and user experience. They were able to speed up startup times and load content dynamically, optimizing the app for users.

In 2019, Supernova, a company building a collaborative design system platform, explored the possibilities of using Flutter to build a web-based version of their application.

Originally, Supernova was a native macOS app, but ultimately, it chose to use Flutter for their web platform because it would allow them to share a single codebase between the web application and a separate plugin they built to run within Figma. This would enable seamless integration between the design and development workflows.

The key reason Supernova selected Flutter was its ability to handle font management effectively. Using the google_fonts package, Supernova can support any font a designer wants to use, automatically downloading the fonts directly from Google.

After that, Supernova launched their innovative design system platform built with Flutter, where users can bring their Figma designs into Supernova and immediately start exporting code for Flutter, as well as other frameworks.

Toyota is leveraging Flutter's Embedder API to craft Linux-powered infotainment systems for their vehicles. This automotive giant, recognizing the value of Flutter's open-source nature, wanted to enhance its infotainment systems, given Flutter's support for embedded devices.

With Flutter's robust rendering engine and features such as Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation, their development team was empowered to deliver a product that feels like a premium one.

Kijiji, a Canadian online classified advertising website facilitating local advertisement postings and buy/sell transactions within communities, turned to Flutter to streamline their development process and reduce future technical complexities.

By transitioning from a native codebase to Flutter, Kijiji successfully condensed their mobile app's core features within 9 months, a significant improvement from the 2-3 years required for native app development.

This expedited development pace enabled Kijiji to introduce new features with a 50% faster turnaround time. Additionally, the migration to Flutter resulted in a notable 64% reduction in their codebase size.

MarketWatch needed to build a mobile app for their Virtual Stock Exchange game within a tight 3-month deadline before the start of the academic year. Developing native iOS and Android apps would have taken too long, so they decided to use Flutter instead.

By leveraging its ready-to-use widget libraries and Hot Reload feature, the MarketWatch team was able to rapidly build and iterate on the app's user-friendly design and robust features. This included interactive charts, real-time trading, and a leaderboard to track user performance.

The use of Flutter enabled MarketWatch to launch the new mobile app in just 3 months, leading to a 50% reduction in development costs compared to building native apps.

Google, which fiercely competes in AI areas, could not miss the opportunity to integrate its Flutter with Gemini, its own Large Language Models (LLMs) family, thereby making Flutter even more appealing.

The examples above, drawn from companies spanning diverse industries and scales, all convey a consistent narrative: Flutter is highly favored for its versatility, performance, and unique features. Notably, its Hot Reload feature expedites development by instantly reflecting code changes in the app interface. Additionally, its widget-based architecture simplifies UI development, while customizable UI elements enhance visual appeal.

The primary driver prompting companies to adopt a cross-platform approach, particularly with Flutter, is its ability to compile to native code, ensuring high performance and reducing overhead. This advantage is further bolstered by strong community support, offering a plethora of resources.

From finance to education and automotive sectors, companies like ByteDance, Betterment, Tencent Cloud Chat, and Toyota have leveraged Flutter's capabilities to streamline development processes, minimize codebase sizes, and deliver exceptional user experiences.