We've been building mobile applications since before the first App Store; we wrote our first Flutter application in March of 2020 for the World Central Kitchen Direct program. Since then, we've replatformed an existing mobile app onto Flutter, and we find it to be fast, stable, and easy to maintain, which gives it an advantage over other frameworks including React Native.
World Central Kitchen enlisted SmartLogic to transform its MVP into a scalable platform as they aimed to expand their text-to-order food relief program during the COVID-19 pandemic, including an iPad app for restaurants built in Flutter and a TailwindUI admin interface.
SpotCrime aggregates crime data from police departments all over the United States, maps the data, and provides email crime alerts. SpotCrime’s data tracking helps both police departments and citizens build safer communities.
Why Flutter? Check out this blog post by developer Alex Housand for more insight into why we gave Flutter a try and why it's now our favorite mobile development framework. Highlights include: great maintainability and developer quality of life; a standalone rendering engine that reduces edge cases; a clear widget hierarchy; explicit state management for rendering, which makes it easier to decompose a UI into reusable components; type checks from Dart; smart and useful defaults; and a simple build chain that makes it easier to maintain across version updates. Flutter also has a great open source community of additional components; all the major libraries we like to leverage have good SDKs for Flutter, including Stripe and all the Google products. Our Director of Engineering, Dan Ivovich, has this to say about Flutter:
"I prefer developing outside VSCode — I prefer doing things in VIM by hand, but the Flutter toolchain is so good that I'm happy to use it."Dan Ivovich, Director of Engineering, SmartLogic
Our team has also found Flutter to be a quick framework for our developers to learn, enabling them to get up and running quickly, which is always a bonus.
Interested in learning more about Flutter? Check out our blog, we've written about Flutter and other mobile application technologies that we've worked with over the years. . Follow us @smartlogic on Twitter to learn more about how we're using React Native. Or give us a call us at 888-544-SMRT, email us at [email protected], or reach out through our contact form. We would be happy to talk with you about your project idea, or host you for a lunch and learn with our technical team.