Cross-platform development toolkits are winning over the developers’ community. Reusable blocks of UI, reactive performance, code usability on multiple platforms are some of the reasons why these cross-platform app development frameworks are gaining ground. One such sought-after framework for mobile app development is Flutter by Google.
Flutter is an open-source, cross-platform mobile app development framework for building native interfaces on Android and iOS. Introduced by Google in 2017, Flutter facilitates wrapping a web view in a native app. Other than its prowess to build apps with a native look & feel, this app development framework by Google is well-received by the developers and ISVs for development for reasons like:
Dart is an open-source, general-purpose programming language developed by Google. It was first introduced in 2011 with the goal of providing a fast, efficient, and portable language for building web, mobile, and desktop applications.
Initially designed as an alternative to JavaScript for web development, Dart has evolved and found its primary application in the Flutter framework. Dart is the go-to language for building cross-platform native applications using Flutter, offering a combination of performance and developer-friendly features.
Since Flutter facilitates developers to build cross-platform native apps with little to no compromise, the framework has been entrusted by startups and established brands for app development. Here are 15 innovative apps that are built using Flutter, exemplifying its potential to build native apps in varied categories.
1. Google Products- GPay, Classroom, Ads (Utility)
Gpay
Google Pay, known as GPay, is a global digital payment service by Google, serving over 100 million users across dozens of countries. The service allows for a variety of financial transactions, but its growth led to an unsustainable 1.7 million lines of code for its Android and iOS apps. As GPay expanded, the need for separate development on each platform became increasingly inefficient, especially with the rise of iOS users in new markets.
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To address these challenges, GPay turned to Flutter, Google's own cross-platform framework. This strategic move enabled the team to consolidate their efforts into a single, more manageable codebase. As a result, despite adding several new features, the overall codebase was reduced by 35%, and the engineering team's time was saved by an estimated 60-70%, making the app smaller, more efficient, and easier to update.
Google classroom
Following the successful implementation of Flutter in GPay, Google Classroom has likewise transitioned to using the Flutter framework. This migration has significantly boosted the app's performance and efficiency. Thanks to Flutter, the codebase size has been slashed by two-thirds, resulting in a more streamlined and user-friendly application.
Google Ads
The Google Ads app enables users to view campaign stats on Android smartphone. The app showcase campaign details like real-time alerts and notifications, allows calling Google expert, act on suggestions to improve the campaign, add/edit/remove keywords, and more.
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2. eBay Motors (eCommerce)
eBay Motors is an automotive-centric marketplace within eBay, providing a platform for buying and selling vehicles, parts, and accessories. As an extension of the broader eBay ecosystem, it caters specifically to automotive enthusiasts, connecting buyers with diverse listings that span from cars and motorcycles to various automotive components. Despite its significance, the eBay Motors platform lacked a dedicated app exclusively for these users.
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The eBay engineering team faced a tight deadline to create a new app for both Android and iOS in just one year. To meet this challenge, they turned to the cross-platform Flutter framework to efficiently deliver the eBay Motors app, replicating the main eBay experience.
The "hot reload" feature of flutter enabled developers to see the results of their changes almost instantly. In fact, in an internal survey, 100% of developers preferred Flutter development over native options, with 70% finding it "at least twice as fast."
3. Tencent (Social)
Tencent is a leading Chinese multinational technology conglomerate, known for its vast digital products and services, including social media platforms (WeChat, QQ), gaming (League of Legends), messaging apps (QQ Messenger), and finance (Tencent Pay). They're a true internet giant, influencing various aspects of daily life in China and beyond.
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Tencent's use of Flutter is publicly known for a couple of applications, such as 'Now Live,' a live-streaming application, and another one is the AITeacher app, which focuses on AI-driven education.
Tencent's investment in Flutter goes beyond just application development. They are also one of the major contributors to the Flutter ecosystem. For instance, Tencent has created and open-sourced a number of plugins and packages that are useful for the Flutter community.
4. BMW (Lifestyle)
Another famous app built with Flutter framework is MyBMW app. BMW, or Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, is a prestigious German company known for manufacturing luxury vehicles and motorcycles that symbolize quality and innovation. With a global presence, BMW has established itself as a leading brand in the automotive industry.
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Faced with the challenge of inconsistent features and designs between their iOS and Android vehicle companion apps, BMW sought a solution to harmonize their mobile offerings. The disparity had become too pronounced, and there was a need to ensure uniform functionality for all users, regardless of the operating system, without incurring excessive costs or hindering the pace of feature development.
In response to this issue, BMW turned to the Flutter framework for its cross-platform capabilities. By adopting Flutter, they were able to create a single, unified codebase for both iOS and Android platforms. This approach not only streamlined the development process but also enabled the simultaneous release of products with identical features across different brands, platforms, and regions.
5. Philips Hue (Lifestyle)
Philips Hue is a line of smart lighting products that can be controlled wirelessly. Introduced in 2012, it includes color-changing LED bulbs, strips, and lamps that users can adjust via a mobile app or voice control. Compatible with smart home ecosystems, Hue enables customizable lighting, scheduling, and syncing with media for immersive experiences.
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To advance their mobile app development, the Philips Hue division opted for the Flutter framework, leading to the launch of the Hue Sync and Hue Bluetooth applications. Their collaboration with Flutter commenced in 2018 and has contributed to a significant milestone, with the apps collectively surpassing 5 million downloads.
6. So Vegan (Health & Fitness)
So Vegan, a platform renowned for its accessible vegan recipes, identified the need for a unified digital presence to host and share their content, including recipes, videos, and images. To achieve this, they reached out to a development agency to create their first mobile app, geared towards a user-friendly experience and scalability. The team indeed chose Flutter for its cross-platform capabilities, allowing for simultaneous deployment on iOS and Android.
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The app has seen considerable success, with over 45,000 downloads, and has begun generating revenue since its inception. Moreover, its design and user experience have earned it recognition as Apple's "App of the Day" twice and a Web Excellence Award. This new app has enabled "So Vegan" to expand their reach and engage with a broader audience, further cementing their place in the vegan community.
7. Kijiji (Ecommerce)
Kijiji is an online classifieds platform where users can buy, sell, or trade goods and services locally. Originating in Canada, it offers categories like real estate, jobs, cars, and personal ads. It's a go-to site for finding deals and making transactions within one's own city or neighborhood, promoting a convenient and straightforward peer-to-peer shopping experience.
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However, with nearly 11 million monthly active users, the Kijiji mobile app faced challenges with its extensive and aged native code, leading to a desire for a more streamlined and maintainable solution. Their native apps, burdened by years of accrued technical debt, required a significant overhaul to enhance performance and achieve uniformity across Android and iOS devices.
Choosing to rebuild with Flutter, Kijiji aimed to eradicate existing complexities and start afresh. Flutter's single codebase approach facilitated simultaneous feature updates for both platforms, a task that had previously proven difficult. The use of Flutter's widgets also allowed the team to create self-contained, reusable components, enabling parallel development without overlap and reducing code bloat.
This strategic shift to Flutter resulted in a drastic reduction of dependencies and a more concise codebase—shrinking from 2.5 million lines of code on the Android app to around 900,000 with complete code coverage.
8. NuBank (Finance)
Nubank, a leading digital bank, faced challenges in rapidly developing and deploying new features due to a shortage of native mobile specialists, leading to imbalances and inefficiencies between their iOS and Android teams. To address this, Nubank explored cross-platform technologies to enable single teams to work on both mobile platforms simultaneously.
After evaluating various options including Kotlin Native, React Native, and Flutter, Nubank’s task force found Flutter to be the best fit based on criteria such as developer experience, platform stability, and consistency across iOS and Android. Developers found Flutter enjoyable to use, with excellent hot reload capabilities, strong documentation, and robust testing infrastructure.
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The adoption of Flutter reduced build times significantly, exemplified by the rapid three-month launch of a new life insurance feature. Additionally, Flutter improved Nubank's development efficiency with a 30% better merge success rate and much faster pull request merges.
9. ByteDance (Socal)
ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, turned to Flutter in 2019 to streamline their app development process across multiple platforms, including Android, iOS, and web. They chose Flutter because it eliminated the need to develop separate versions for each platform, thanks to Flutter's own rendering engine, which also provided consistent performance and automatic synchronization across app versions.
ByteDance tailored Flutter’s open-source framework to their specific requirements, ultimately contributing to the Flutter community by enhancing app frameworks, containerization, and performance.
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After adopting Flutter, ByteDance significantly increased their development efficiency, with a 33% boost in team productivity for major apps like Xingfuli and Xigua Video. With a strong team of more than 700 Flutter developers, over 200 of whom are actively developing, ByteDance uses Flutter for a wide range of applications, extending beyond mobile to include web, desktop, and embedded platforms.
10. Alibaba (eCommerce)
The Alibaba.com app is a wholesale marketplace for global trade and incorporates Flutter to power parts of the app. The app allows its users to buy products from suppliers around the world, all from the convenience of a mobile app.
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11. Reflectly (Lifestyle)
Reflectly is a journal and mindfulness app, driven by Artificial Intelligence. This Flutter app allows its users to create stories in a personal journal, offer a new set of questions every day to reflect the day, unlock advanced statistics and personal, actionable insights; all wrapped into a beautiful interface.
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12. Birch Finance (Finance)
Birch Finance is a credit card rewards app that helps its users to manage and optimize existing cards. The app enables its users to find the best card for them (according to their spending pattern), tracking spending across all accounts, and offer different ways to earn and redeem rewards.
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13. Hamilton Musical (Entertainment)
Flutter empowers the official app of the hit Broadway musical, Hamilton. The app includes exclusive daily news and videos, daily lotteries for New York, Chicago, London, and tour locations, daily trivia game, merchandise store (to purchase items from the official Hamilton store), and more.
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14. Coach Yourself (Health and Fitness)
Coach Yourself is a meditation app made for the German market, facilitating its users to quit their unwanted habits and strengthen their personal development.
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15. Hookle (Social)
Hookle is another app built using Flutter that allows its users to share posts, monitor social activity, and manage multiple social media accounts in one place. Hookle facilitates composing and publishing posts to multiple social media channels, monitor activities across all channels at a glance, customize posts per social media channel, and more.
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16. Watermaniac (Health & Fitness)
Watermaniac is an app that helps its users to track the amount of water they drink. The app enables its users to set a daily goal of water, have a history of all drinks that users took (and logged), and customize notifications to remind users about drinking water.
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17. Cryptograph (Finance)
CryptoGraph provides the latest data and figures for more than 1,600 cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP) etc. The app presents Exchange rate charts, allows selecting and adding coins to Favorites for easy tracking, and more.
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18. SG BusTracker (Maps & Navigation)
SG BusTracker gives an estimated time of arrival for buses in Singapore. The app enables its users to see a listing of nearby bus stops, serviced by SBS, SMRT, Go Ahead, and Tower Buses, along with seat availability defined with colour codes: Green (seat available), Yellow (standing available), Red (limited standing).
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19. Inkino (Movie Ticket Booking)
Trick question, what do Finnish people do when they are not busy admiring their countryside or hiking? Well, they go to the movie theatres, of course!!! InKino app helps its users to choose movies quickly due to the intuitive user interface and easy scrolling. With around 40% of the codebase shared between the web and Flutter, InKino is a good example of a multiplatform Dart project.
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20. Music Tutor (Education)
Music Tutor is a music learning app that teaches its users to learn piano and read sheet music. The app supports Solfege and German note names. The app is equipped with a sheet music reference chart for treble, bass and alto clefs. The app is moving up the rankings on the App Store, thanks to the native look and feel of the app.
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21. Topline (Utility)
This app helps musicians capture their musical ideas on the go. The app lets its users record their music, add lyrics, share files and sync them easily to the cloud. Topline is build using Flutter.
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22. Postmuse (Utility)
We have all witnessed the shift of businesses from Facebook to Instagram, which just makes sense to have professional looking Instagram photos in your profile. This is where PostMuse intervenes. PostMuse lets its user browse through Instagram photo templates, edit them, and lets them create their templates. The app also suggests the best images that you can use on your profile so it looks professional.
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23. In10 (Social)
In10 allows users to create new events in an easy intuitive user interface, share status updates and ETAs and invite guests to an event using SMS services. User's privacy is given the highest importance as the users can only see the relative distance of other members of the meetup group to the event location.
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The app examples shared above elucidates that Flutter has got potential for mobile app development, with any scale, idea, category, with any type of content. If you too have an app idea that this amazing technology can do justice to, then talk to our experts about getting started with mobile app development using Flutter.