Flutter Web | The most underrated part of Flutter Ecosystem.
Since the stable release of Flutter web with Flutter 2.0, there is a discussion about its stability, performance, and use case.
I found community generally discussing its poor SEO, huge initial load speed, scrolling issue, and bundle size for more info on this check Flutter team’s official survey. Yes, Flutter team has touched all of the points and more to improve the experience but Flutter web is still not at par with other web frameworks out there, so we can blindly pick it for our web projects though I am root for it and one day for sure.
Also, Flutter team has mentioned the reason for its stable reason and place of Flutter web in the web ecosystem is to create a web app. I have a humble opinion that I think no one is talking about and hence this blog.
I believe at the current stage one of the greatest value Flutter webs brings to the table is bringing Forward compatibility to all Flutter apps.
Forward Compatibility.
Forward compatibility is a design characteristic that allows a system to accept input intended for a later version of itself.
One of the greatest pain of application stakeholders is app updates. Now, there are many workarounds for this like auto-update, force update, update pop-ups, and so on but nothing quite compared to the web ecosystem.
This is actually a huge concern if you are in a Startup and your primary product is an app. Startups are always in a constant war against time leaving them some runway time. Now if your next feature took a month to build and one more till it gets downloaded by every user, you effectively will be left X amount of experiment left with you.
No. of experiment = runway time* / amount of time for building and distribution
* in ideal condition always expanding
Flutter itself provides the most incredible value in cutting the amount of time building and I humbly pass an opinion that Flutter web can cut a good amount of time in distributing new features to the user almost in real-time. This lets startups more time to make more experiments and change the world.
I hear you asking yes, but how exactly? also again Forward compatibility in Flutter case? For this let me give a clear example.
In the previous Startup, We had a modular dynamic UI meaning we can create a screen, route, and add new tabs to the bottom bar from the server side which was powered by Firebase’s Firestore hence real-time too.
FYI, I am writing down all my learning in the articles currently published on dynamic bottom navigation under the power series. For more to come please subscribe to get notified.
One fine day (in startups this day never comes) Product and Growth team decided on the ability for users to create posters and able to share them with their groups outside the app with app link.
We built and ship it, but not many people were using it natural reason being the majority of people haven’t updated the app, and the popup of force update for Growth feature is way too much to ask. All we could do is wait, watch and let the time pass by.
As an engineer, we can see the clear problem, so decided to come up with a solution which is making the app forward compatibility with Flutter Web.
To go into detail, since UI is modular and dynamic we added a PosterCard to the home screen which onTap will navigate to PosterView, if a route exists then Flutter View will be rendered if not then WebView will render the Flutter web version of PosterView.
This way all the users can try out new features without updating the app the very instant 🤯. Now some parts of the feature may not be usable in the web version but that’s where we can place an update button and using javascriptChannels update the app, seamlessly. You see, it opens up a lot of possibilities for product development, distribution, and rapid growth experiments.
And this to me is the most underrated, underappreciated value that Flutter web provides.
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Build and ship — Sneh Mehta.
