Building a startup is a challenging endeavor that requires a lot of effort, time, and resources to get off the ground. With more and more small and medium-sized businesses following the mobile app trend, it becomes imperative to have your product offerings on mobile.

While a mobile app can help you stay ahead of the game, building one requires a lot of financial resources. The costs significantly go up when you're planning on building your app for multiple platforms.

With the use of Flutter, you can significantly cut down on costs. Flutter is a cross-platform app development toolkit that allows developers to build, test and deploy mobile, web, desktop, and embedded apps from a single codebase. That way, you need to write the code only once in Flutter and the app will work seamlessly across platforms.

Not just startups but companies of all sizes use Flutter due to its cross-platform capabilities. For instance, Google Ads, a mobile application that allows users to manage their ad campaigns is built using the Flutter framework.

In this article, we share the top five reasons why Flutter remains the most popular choice among startup founders for mobile app development. Let's get started.

A minimum viable product, or MVP, is a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers so that they can provide feedback allowing the creators to refine the product.

The essence of an MVP is to get into the market with a basic product, introduce new features and iterate along the way rather than perfecting a product before launch.

Flutter offers a few tools and pre-developed libraries that speed up the app-development process helping you launch from the ground up within weeks. The top tools include Firebase, Codemagic, and Crashlytics while the most frequently used libraries include Provider (State Manager), Local Notifications, Native Splash, Google Maps, Permission handler, and File Picker.

Adding functionality to a mobile app is a time-consuming process and requires long functions of code to get them working. With the use of Flutter libraries, developers can achieve desired functionalities with less code in a short duration of time. Since most of these libraries are open-source, developers can customize them as per the app requirements.

Flutter 1.0, the first stable release of Google's app development toolkit supported Android and iOS platforms. With the continuous efforts of the developer community and Google, it now supports multiple platforms like Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows, Google Fuchsia, and the web.

With a single codebase, the app has to be developed once and it can be deployed on various platforms simultaneously without the need of building for each platform separately. Any changes made get reflected on the app over all platforms.

A native application is a software program that is designed to run specifically on a particular operating system. Native apps provide a good user experience and are fast and secure.

Applications developed using Flutter look and perform like native iOS or Android apps due to the availability of the right themes. For instance, Material is a theme for Android, and Cupertino is a theme for iOS. The code written in Dart, the programming language used to code Flutter apps, is compiled into native code without the need for mediators.

User Interface (UI) refers to the fonts, font styles, cards, colors, micro animations, and other visual elements that you interact with while using an app. A good UI can help you retain customers and boost engagement.

With Flutter's software development kit (SDK), developers have a wide range of widgets to fulfill any kind of app design requirements. For instance, there are widgets for text, image, container, card, list view, flat buttons, rows & columns, loading indicators, etc. With 2D GPU acceleration support, animations are smooth too.

Since the first stable release of Flutter in 2018, Google has continuously rolled out updates with the support of the thriving developer community. In the past three years, Google has rolled out three stable versions of Flutter with support for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows, Google Fuchsia, and the web.

Flutter also supports many Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like Android Studio, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ, and Codemagic. By using plugins, developers can write the code in any specific IDE they're used to.

The following chart shows the fast-growing interest in Flutter, with lots of questions being posted, answered, and viewed on StackOverflow - a Q&A community for programmers.

If you're building a startup and plan on developing a mobile app, Flutter is by far the best choice. It's not just cost-effective and time-saving but your application would be available on multiple operating systems with a single codebase thus increasing your product's reach.

As emphasized by Reid Hoffman, it's more important to get into the market with a basic product, roll out new features and iterate along the way rather than spending time on perfecting the product before launch.