Top Flutter App Development Tools to Use in 2021

Imagine a day without your mobile phone? Sound’s no less than a nightmare, right? For better or worse, we’re all guilty of being highly dependent on our phones. Speaking of which it would be a sin not to mention mobile applications while on the topic. Welcome to the 21st century, where there’s a mobile app for everything.

Mobile applications have made our lives simpler, more efficient, and straightforward. By streamlining thousands of things into one tiny little application, its turned our lives into a piece of cake. Need to measure your daily step count? There’s an app for it. Want to read your favorite book? Install an app and download an e-book and there it is! From shopping to booking tickets, paying bills, and ordering food, there’s literally an app for everything.

We’re pretty sure that by now we’ve portrayed the significance of mobile applications.

However, if you’re still not convinced,  then let these numbers do the talking!

Table of content

• What is Flutter?
• Apps Built With Flutter
• Things to Love About Flutter
• Top 12 Flutter App Development Tools in 2021
• Conclusion

Statistics

• Mobile app downloads increased by 23.3% amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Research by App Annie tells us how mobile app downloads have witnessed a sharp rise of 45% since 2017

Fun Fact: Did you know iPhone’s App Store & Google’s Playstore have been around for only 12 years now? That seems mind-boggling, right? It feels like they’ve been a part of our lives forever.

• According to Marketing Charts, mobile app usage now accounts for 70% of all digital media time, highly dominating all media consumption.
• 48% of users determine a brand’s credibility by the performance of its mobile application.

It’s clearly evident how mobile apps are an indispensable part of our lives. Although, the question arises, how are mobile apps developed and what are the tools we can make use of?

The need for mobile apps in our day-to-day lives has introduced software solutions like Flutter App Development completing changing the app development industry for the better.

What is Flutter?

Google’s Flutter is an open-source UI software development framework that allows you to build attractive and responsive mobile applications for the homes of all apps i.e IOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux, all with an existing code. This cross-platform app development framework has become an industry favorite and risen to popularity in just a short amount of time.

Apps Built With Flutter

You may or may not even realize that so many apps that you make use of on a daily basis are all made on Flutter. Applications that have taken flight with Flutter are Google Ads, Postmuse, Xianyu by Alibaba, KlasterMe, BMW, Square, Tencent, and so on.

Things to Love About Flutter

If you’re looking to develop appealing, cost-effective, cross-platform, and native complied applications, then Flutter is your best bet. Here’s a quick display of why you should use Flutter along with its benefits.

Top 12 Flutter App Development Tools in 2021

Google’s track record and trust factor make Flutter widely recognized and reliable, although it still requires third-party developer tools for an extraordinary finished result. Having said this, let’s knock on the doors of Flutter Tools and take a look at the Flutter App Development Tools mobile app developers must be familiar with.

This article will cover the top 12 Flutter App Dev Tools for you to try your hands on in 2021 explained along with its primary features for better understanding.

Panache: Flutter Material Editor

Panache is a Flutter material editor tool securing the top spot when it comes to popularity and winning the trust quotient amongst developers. Used by over 40 million Flutter app developers and testers, Panache is a free and open-source tool with amazing features for easy personalization.

Known as one of the best Flutter app development tools, Panache helps create custom material themes for your flutter application and possesses a myriad of options to customize the colors of components and widgets, shapes, and other theme properties along with the ease of directly exporting it as a .dart file to your Google Drive folder.

Primary Features:

• Helps create attractive material themes
• Equipped with plenty of customization options
• Free, easily accessible, and open-source tool

Count.ly: Product analytics tool

It is only when you are able to track key metrics and measure performance is when you actually realize the success of an application. Count.ly holds its ground as the best analytics tool amidst the arena of flutter development tools.

It helps add value to the customer’s experience on mobile, web, and desktop applications by tracking necessary KPIs that measure an app’s performance. However, its paid version hosted on-premise or Cloud opens the door to track more detailed metrics by providing several additional features such as A/B testing and push notifications.  

Primary Features:

• In-app analytics & stats
• One single dashboard
• Can be expanded through plugins

Supernova: Flutter support tool

A new but popular contender amongst the Flutter app dev tools, Supernova has recently made its way as a support tool for the Flutter platform in Flutter interact. It allows you to import your UI designs to Supernova and shift them to Flutter for developing responsive applications.

With Supernova, you can run a Flutter app simultaneously to make changes and modifications that happen in real-time. The cherry on the cake is that it saves time by letting you import your Sketch or Adobe XD file and export it to Flutter to revamp your app’s UI design.

Primary Features:

• Enables export to Flutter
• Uncomplicated iteration
• Intelligent prototyping
• Provides ready-to-use & responsive layouts

Codemagic

Codemagic just like its name is one of the other magical Flutter development tools. Its automation feature allows you to test and develop mobile applications, whilst removing the requirement for configuration which simplifies the release process by a million miles per hour. Codemagic enables undisturbed, up-front, and hassle-free integration, delivery, and launch process for apps developed on the Flutter framework.

Primary Features:

• Automated processes
• Constantly updated with the latest developer tools
• Smooth delivery enabling more time to market

Test Magic: Testing & Deployment Tool

Test Magic is one of the many essential Flutter tools that enable testing and deployment of beta releases of iOS and Android applications. It lets you download CI/CD builds seamlessly on all the devices that are linked to it and streamline the deployment process to a great extent.

Test Magic easily integrates itself with Codemagic allowing you to add test devices and look after provisioning profiles for iOS debug builds. It also gives you a wonderful option of taking and uploading screenshots in order to provide feedback for better app functions.

Primary Features:

• Supports E2E testing completely
• Supports various file formats and databases
• One-script approach for all
• AI-powered object identification assistance  

Sylph

Slyph is an open-source command app development tool working on Windows, Mac, Linux, and CI environments that lets you run Flutter integration and tests, supporting almost every iOS and Android device. This Flutter app development tool works like a charm with AWS Device Farm

Primary Features:

• Enables creation of testable iOS to debug app
• Easy configuration
• Supports many iOS & Android devices in a single run

RevenueCat: Subscription & in-app purchases tool

RevenueCat SDK supporting iOS, Android and Stripe are no less than a godsend tool successfully managing subscriptions and in-app purchases. RevenueCat is one of the Flutter tools looking after your app business on any platform also allowing app evaluation on the basis of functionality and performance by measuring factors such as LTR, MRR, and Churn.

Primary Features:

• Easy subscription and purchases
• Measurements & reporting
• Price testing
• Data integrations

Visual Code

Visual Code Studio is another one of the Flutter app dev tools to keep an eye out for. A cross-platform mobile app development platform that provides several shortcuts supporting superfast Flutter development. The best part about this Flutter tool is that it makes it easier to run tasks, provides version control, and develops and debugs cloud and web apps.

Visual Code Studio created by Microsoft is an open-source code editor supporting Windows, Linux, and macOS. Some of the key features that work in this tool’s favor are debugging plugins, code refactoring, GIT control, smart code completion, and syntax highlighting. It has garnered its reputation as a super simple to use, highly productive, and powerful tool that works impeccably with Python and C++ and various other complex workflows.

Primary Features:

• Automated code completions
• Embedded Git commands
• Debug code from the editor
• Customizable

Adobe XD

Adobe brought in the game-changing “Adobe XD”. plugin to the app development world and unveiled its latest plugin at the Flutter Interact event. The design mogul played to their strengths with the plugins allowing you to create attractive and engaging looking mobile designs and creating its. dart file for you to place directly in your app codebase.

Primary Features:

• Design structures & layouts
• Wireframing, prototyping & animating
• Collaboration from a single place

Firebase

Next in line when discussing Flutter development tools is Google’s Firebase which helps in building and running successful mobile applications. It provides support to launch across Android and iOS platforms. Firebase APIs can be worked and combined into a single SDK in order to integrate it with the backend.

What sets Firebase apart from other Flutter app development tools is its offering of spectacular features and functionalities like crash reporting, real-time database, messaging campaigns, remote configuration, cloud storage, machine learning and hosting, and firebase authentication.

Primary Features:

• Faster app development
• Measure and observe performance
• Supports analytics & A/B testing  

Instabug

Instabug is a great platform for understanding mobile apps and tracking their insights in real-time. When integrated with the Flutter, it helps in detecting bugs, finding errors, notifying in-app crashing, surveys, and feature requests for tracking user’s movements. This tool lets you take screenshots, compile device logs and information and share detailed crash reports which can further be used to detect the problem and find its solution quickly.

Primary Features:

• Detecting & reporting bugs and errors
• In-app crash reporting
• Monitoring app’s performance
• Surveys & feature requests

Appetize

Appetize is an excellent online-based cross-platform mobile app development tool that is ideal for creating Flutter games. This Flutter app development tool helps release apps on your iOS and Android application in a quick and robust manner. Due to its fast development, it helps in decreasing the time-to-market and also lets you run native mobile applications in JavaScript and HTML format in your browser. Appetize enhances the introduction process of your Flutter application and can be used to run app demos easily, for rapid development, testing, training, etc.

Primary Features:

• Training, testing, and customer support
• Automation
• Rapid deployments

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Conclusion

And here it is, the top 12 Flutter app development tools you cannot miss out on in 2021. There’s no doubt about the fact that a mobile app can make or break your business’s reputation and you’d rather want to be in the former category than the latter. Flutter is definitely one of the most high-ranking and popular software when it comes to building mobile apps.

The key to developing an amazing and customer-centric mobile app is by taking your time when selecting from the varied options of Flutter development tools. Flutter is a sure-shot way of creating beautiful, fast, and effective apps. Still, concerned about how to take your vision of the perfect mobile app forward? We have an expert team of Flutter app developers ready to give shape to your ideas. Hire a Flutter app developer and let us take care of everything.

Krunal Shah

Krunal Shah is the CTO and Co-founder at Third Rock Techkno. With extensive experience gained over a decade, Krunal helps his clients build software solutions that stand out in the industry and are lighter on the pocket.

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