Celebrating Flutter’s “Production Era”

This article is cross posted on Flutter

Just over six years ago, we unveiled Flutter 1.0. Today, at #FlutterInProduction, we’re celebrating how far we’ve come — from the immense support we’ve received from thousands of contributors in the community, to the widespread adoption of Flutter as a production-grade app framework for building multi-platform app experiences.

If you haven’t experienced Flutter yet, we invite you to try it! As we shared today, you’d be joining a big group: Flutter has over 1 million monthly active developers across the globe, and powers nearly 30% of all new iOS apps. More than 90 thousand developers actively participate in Flutter Meetups across more than sixty countries. And if you want input on designing or building a new successful Flutter app, we have a large and growing list of Flutter Consultants ready to help you.

“Apptopia tracks millions of apps in the Apple AppStore and Google Play Store, and analyzes and detects which developer SDKs were used to create the apps. Flutter is one of the most popular SDKs we track: In the Apple AppStore it has grown steadily in usage from around 10% of all tracked free apps in 2021 to nearly 30% of all tracked free apps in 2024!”
— Apptopia Inc.

A decade of innovation to reach the production era

It’s been an incredible journey, starting in 2014 (in what we now call our experimental era) as a Google experiment codenamed “Sky.”

Before Flutter, compromises were inevitable. Many developers have become skeptical that any framework can truly deliver a premium experience across multiple platforms.

With the launch of Flutter 1.0 in 2018 we had a clear mission to resolve that technology dilemma: We aimed to empower developers with the ultimate app framework for crafting beautiful, high-performance user interfaces across all platforms. Also, to enable developers to reach all customers with high-quality apps on all the platforms that customers care about, but with lower cost and in less time.

Our focus has remained constant through Flutter’s growth era, even as we’ve added support for the six major platforms across mobile, web, and desktop — and continue to push beyond, with work like Toyota’s use of Flutter for infotainment systems.

We’re now in the “production era,” and we’re celebrating that with #FlutterInProduction! This event spotlights the achievements of developers using Flutter in real-world applications.

Building in partnership with the community

None of this would be possible without our amazing community of over 1,400 contributors, more than 10,000 package publishers authoring over 50,000 packages, and passionate Flutter content creators and enthusiasts.

Together, we’ve built a top-5 GitHub open-source project by contributions!

Amazing user experiences

It all starts with a focus on enabling amazing user experiences. Free from typical platform constraints, Flutter supports a broad set of design languages — support for Material Design and our Apple-inspired Cupertino widgets comes with the SDK. The ecosystem also provides a broad selection of design libraries like Windows-inspired fluent_ui, macOS-inspired macos_ui, and the Ubuntu-inspired yaru widgets.

Scandinavian Airlines design awards

With Flutter, you have the flexibility and power to realize any design your design team envisions. This is exemplified by Scandinavian Airlines, who after creating their new mobile app with Flutter have filled their trophy case with prestigious design awards such as the Red Dot Design Award, the Webby People’s Voice Award, and the iF Design Gold Award. Charlotte Svensson, EVP & CIO at SAS explains:

“I’m extremely proud over this award, which is not just an industry award, but a global recognition. It’s a testament to what we can do, when we go above-and-beyond in focusing on improving the customer experience, and when we interact and develop together with our customers. SAS has always been at the forefront of innovation in the aviation industry, and this award serves as a validation of its dedication to providing exceptional digital solutions for our customers.”

Great performance & reliability

Performance and reliability are crucial for a positive user experience and brand perception. Slow or crash-prone apps not only frustrate users in the short term but can also damage your brand reputation in the long run through negative reviews and word-of-mouth.

Flutter has prioritized performance and reliability from the outset. By choosing the Dart programming language, we ensure fast startup times through ahead-of-time compilation to native machine code or web assembly. Dart’s rich, null-safety type system helps catch errors during development, further enhancing reliability. Additionally, Flutter’s custom Impeller rendering engine, designed specifically for multi-platform UI, delivers smooth animations and gives us full control over the rendering stack, top to bottom, from the UI source code to the GPU.

Universal Studios performance and reliability

For example, Universal Destinations and Experiences recently reported that by adopting Flutter, they not only decreased their app size — a significant benefit for users with unreliable internet connections — but also dramatically reduced app crashes to near zero, thus lowering their total cost of ownership.

LG Electronics performance

LG Electronics has traditionally relied on web apps for their webOS-powered smart TVs due to concerns about the high development cost of traditional native apps. However, they found that web apps launch slower and consume more memory than native apps. With Flutter, LG Electronics has a solution that combines fast development speed and excellent performance. As a result, they plan to use Flutter for key applications in webOS TVs globally starting in 2025.

First-class developer experience and thriving ecosystem

Flutter’s success is deeply rooted in its focus on developer experience. We pioneered instant developer workflows with Stateful Hot Reload, and during our growth era added Flutter DevTools to significantly accelerate diagnostics and debugging workflows.

Flutter’s community provides a thriving and open ecosystem of over 50,000 packages published by over 10,000 publishers, combined with robust third-party services & technologies. Also, if you want input on designing or building a new successful Flutter app, we have a large list of Flutter Consultants ready to help you.

MGM and developer productivity

App agency Superformula has built with Flutter since August 2020. They found that Flutter is easy to learn and well documented, enabling them to get new team members up to speed quickly and contribute effectively.

Superformula also used Flutter to revitalize the digital dining experience for MGM Resorts’ 400+ restaurants. The new Flutter-based MGM Rewards app was rebuilt in just 4 months, cutting the total amount of code in half, and improving delivery speed by a factor of 4. One core enabler of productivity for Superformula is the ability to share code across mobile, tablet-based kiosks, and web-based tools.

A sneak preview of the future

As we said, some of the most important work the Flutter team will undertake in the next few years is to sustain the quality and depth of support demanded by the enterprises delivering Flutter-based experiences to hundreds of millions of users all over the world.

To meet these evolving needs, we’re focusing on several key areas:

• Deeper iOS fidelity: We’re continuing to deliver even greater fidelity to Apple’s design language by expanding our Cupertino widgets. And we’re embracing modern Apple ecosystem standards like Swift Package Manager.

• Seamless platform integration: We’re investigating a new approach to interoperability — direct native interop — which we believe will simplify access to platform-specific APIs available in C, Java, Kotlin, ObjectiveC, or Swift.

• Developer productivity enhancements: We’re continuing to evolve our developer tools by exploring potential new UI design features that may offer a live widget previewer combined with real-time visual property editing.

• Concise and readable code: To boost developer productivity, we’re exploring how to make Flutter code quicker to write and easier to read. This includes potential new language features such as ‘primary constructors’ and ‘enum shorthands’, and looking through the Flutter framework to identify new APIs that may offer a more concise way of writing common code.

As Rivers so accurately puts it, things have certainly “gotten a little slicker, and a bit more professional” and it’s our intention to keep things feeling that way going into the future.

Ready to use #FlutterInProduction?

If you haven’t tried Flutter recently, there’s never been a better time!

Want to learn more from others’ experiences first?

• Attend the Observable Flutter panel on December 19th, 2024

• Join the Flutter community: Find a local meetup, join the forum, or connect on Slack: https://flutter.dev/community

We’re dedicated to earning your trust with an unwavering focus on quality and performance. We continue to drive our roadmap from the needs of our users. That has evolved too over the last 6 years of growth, from individuals and hobbyists in our experimental era, to the large enterprises leveraging Flutter for business critical functionality today.

As always, we can’t wait to see what you build next. Until next time!