Benefits of Flutter for Cross-Platform App Development
Article Summary
Still running separate iOS and Android teams in 2024? The economics of native development just stopped making sense. Here's why Flutter is quietly becoming the default choice for engineering leaders who need to ship faster without sacrificing quality.
Very Good Ventures breaks down how cross-platform development evolved into true multi-platform development, covering mobile, web, desktop, and IoT from a single codebase. Drawing from their experience building the first Flutter app outside Google (the Hamilton mobile app), they make the case for consolidating development teams.
Key Takeaways
- Flutter now targets 6+ platforms: iOS, Android, web, MacOS, Windows, and Linux
- Single codebase eliminates team silos and communication delays on bug fixes
- Dart compiles to native code for each platform, no performance compromise
- Existing apps can migrate to Flutter incrementally, component by component
- Lower headcount and maintenance costs compared to multiple native teams
Multi-platform development with Flutter delivers native performance across mobile, web, and desktop while cutting team overhead and accelerating feature velocity.
About This Article
Building for iOS, Android, web, MacOS, Windows, Linux, and IoT devices meant organizations had to manage separate codebases and hire different engineering teams for each platform. The costs and complexity grew quickly.
Very Good Ventures switched to Flutter, a multi-platform framework that uses Dart to compile native code for each platform. This let them maintain a single codebase that worked across five or more platforms without sacrificing performance.
With one team and one codebase, they shipped features faster and spent less time on maintenance. The silos that used to slow down bug fixes and feature releases across different native teams disappeared.