Eugene Saturow Head of Flutter

• Business
• Flutter

February 13, 2023 4 min read

Flutter for Crypto App Development: Advantages of This SDK

At Surf, we’ve been building fintech and crypto apps with Flutter since 2019. As we worked with clients ranging from enterprises to Y Combinator start-ups, we’ve gained lots of insight into why Flutter is a perfect match for these types of apps.

Let’s talk about it in this article.

What makes Flutter a good choice for crypto apps

The crypto market, and especially its web3 vertical, are spaces of ongoing innovation, with new ideas upsetting conventions all the time and new projects popping up constantly. Just look at Uniswap, which pretty much pioneered decentralized liquidity pools and within months of its release was doing almost $2 billion in daily trading volume.To remain competitive, teams need to have a fast time to market. One way to do this is by using a cross-platform dev kit such as Flutter to power your crypto app. 

Flutter is a mobile app development kit created by Google. It allows building user-friendly and high-performance apps for both iOS and Android using a single codebase.

It uses the Dart programming language and has a fast development cycle with “hot reload,” which means that developers can see the changes they make in real-time on the emulator or a real device.

Though this might seem insignificant, it allows the progress of the project to speed up. Over time, these savings become very noticeable. In our experience, building on Flutter can be around 40% faster than native development.

Who uses Flutter to power their projects?

In fintech, the biggest name we can think of is Nubank. This Brazilian fintech giant is now the highest valued neobank in the world, with an evaluation of $45 billion.

Initially, Nubank’s team was coding two separate apps for iOS and Android. As the project expanded, however, it became too much to keep up with their quick release timeline. 

Also, writing features separately for both platforms sometimes created inconsistencies: sometimes users on one device could access features that their counterparts on the other couldn’t yet use.

All of this made the development team rethink their strategy. Nubank chose to go the cross-platform way and put together a committee that carefully assessed all the major frameworks. 

As for cryptocurrency-specific apps, the Flutter Awesome collection is being supplemented with new projects for cryptocurrency trading, tracking, wallets, and more.

Flutter vs. native development: why go cross-platform?

Flutter has a number of benefits, but for the sake of being concise we can sum them up into three primary ones:

• Single codebase approach: By writing code that can be deployed to multiple platforms, you can reuse up to 95% of the codebase. 

• Cost-efficiency: Flutter eliminates the need for multiple separate front-end teams, resulting in up to 40% in cost-savings compared to building native apps for two platforms.

• (Almost) no performance penalty: Because Flutter compiles to native code, apps built with this framework are highly performant. Skia graphics engine ensures 60 — or even 120 — frames per second. While Google is actively implementing Impeller, a graphic engine, which provides for faster and better UI creation.

• Integration with native technologies: To communicate with individual platforms, there is a special platform channel mechanism that allows to describe the execution of individual methods on different operating systems (for instance, enabling flashlight on Android and iOS devices, their platform implementation differs) or subscribe to events and respond to them (for example, when the charging level is low, output a message that it’s time charge the device).

Wrapping up

Curious about how much your next crypto app project could benefit from using Flutter? 

Fill out the form below and we’ll respond to you within one business day with a comparison of Flutter and Native development costs and time needed.