3 Things to Know About Flutter Web Before Choosing It for Your Business

January 16, 2024

Introduction

Flutter 3.16 is here, bringing in some cool stuff! There’s Impeller in preview mode and Predictive Back Navigation for Android 14. Plus, now you can use Flutter widgets in certain iOS extensions. Game developers will love the updates in the Flutter Games Toolkit. This is the last big update of the year, focused on speeding up our development and making our projects better. Let’s check out the important new features in Flutter 3.16.

The answer is yes.

Flutter Web officially launched in March 2020 and increased Flutter’s capability by adding another platform to build the web using the same Flutter code used by the developer for mobile application development. Right now, Flutter is mature enough to build almost everything for web applications. While Flutter Web holds immense potential, it’s important to understand its limitations before diving into its development.

Here are three key things to consider before choosing Flutter Web for your next product:

1. SEO Considerations:

To get more organic traffic to your website, search engine optimization, or SEO, is necessary. Although search engines can analyze Flutter Web apps, there may be difficulties because of their unconventional structure.

Content such as articles or blog posts, for instance, may be difficult to index, which may affect how visible your website is in search results. Furthermore, using Flutter can make it more difficult to integrate web-specific capabilities like structured data and metadescriptions.

2. Performance:

The speed of traditional web apps developed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is not matched by Flutter web apps. This is because Flutter apps use a virtual machine to render their user interface, adding a processing layer.
Because of the size of the required JavaScript bundle, Flutter Web apps can take longer to load initially. Nevertheless, this problem can be significantly minimized with savvy code splitting and caching techniques.

3. Plugin Ecosystem:

One of Flutter’s most significant assets is its vast ecosystem of plugins. However, each plugin has a website counterpart, and those that do might not provide complete compatibility with their mobile equivalents. This may restrict the online functionality of your app.
Additionally, Flutter Web does not currently support all web-specific APIs, which might limit your ability to take advantage of some features.

Beyond the Limitations:

Despite these considerations, Flutter Web has several advantages:

Unified codebase: Save time and resources by developing your app only once and deploying it to desktop, web, and mobile platforms.
Beautiful and expressive user interfaces: Flutter’s reactive framework makes it possible to design gorgeous and dynamic user interfaces.
Quicker development: immediate code iteration is made possible by hot reload, which speeds up the development process.
Huge and dynamic community: Flutter has a growing developer community that is always producing new resources and plugins.

Not every web solution needs to have a unique plugin, SEO, or high performance. Let’s use an example. Let’s say you are developing a solution for internal use. Such as CRM, LMS, POS Systems, Employee Management Systems, Inventory Management, Admin, or a different product that monitors revenue growth, etc.

So, let’s understand when and how to overcome the above three limitations of Flutter Web.

1. SEO Considerations:

If the data is not part of the SEO services at that time, you can use the Flutter web app. How?

Data is used in SEO services such as real estate listings and e-commerce. Here, your properties and product data can be searched by the users, which helps increase the visibility of your platform. Here, the Flutter web app is not for your business.

Data is not part of SEO services such as CRM, LMS, Inventory Management System, etc. These data are not shared for public use; they’re for personal or internal use. So, in that case, data is not part of the SEO services, and you can use the Flutter Web App for your business.

Provide a provision for the user to redirect to the Flutter Web applications from your informative website, which has the capability of SEO services and is built using WordPress, React, or any other technologies. How?

For products like CRM, EMS, Inventory management systems, etc., you can create an informative website with all SEO content, like a Home page with Services, Portfolio, Client feedback, and Blogs, and this content helps to give more reach to your platform. But when customers reach your website and try to log in or onboard themselves, you can redirect them to the Flutter web app to use your business services. The login and registration buttons will redirect the user to the Flutter web app, which is a good example of it.

2. Performance:

Flutter takes time to load the very first time when it executes its whole package in the browser. However, once it is executed and cached by the browser, it runs faster than the other web apps because of the internal navigation system and preloaded content.
If you are building a web solution for internal use purposes and the pre-loading process suits your business, In that case, Flutter Web is good for your business.

Plugin and Echosystem:

Flutter is mature enough for the mobile app, but the Flutter web is still growing. 78% of plugins from all the Flutter plugins (https://pub.dev) are supported by Flutter Web, and those not supported are related to hardware. Third-party service plugins are not supported because the service provider does not write them for the developers. Only a few of them have generic issues, like the fact that iFram is not supported by the Flutter web using WebView.
If the developer has strong knowledge about web development and Flutter development, then using Platform Channel, they can write a plugin for the Flutter web app and start to use it.

Note: I have delivered 12+ Flutter web apps since March 2020. Every time, provided a solution by solving the Flutter web limitations.

Conclusion:

So, for your next product, should you go with Flutter Web? It depends. You might be better off with other technologies if SEO and performance are your main concerns. Flutter Web, however, can be an effective tool if you place a high value on a unified codebase, an expressive user interface, and quick development.
The choice ultimately comes down to carefully balancing the benefits and drawbacks within the framework of your unique project requirements.

Recall that there isn't a universal solution. You can decide if Flutter Web is the best option for your product development journey by being aware of its advantages and disadvantages.

I hope you found this article useful! Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments section below.
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