How to Improve your Flutter App’s Performance?

Sanjay Kidecha
4 min readAug 8, 2022

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Product owners nowadays need high-performance applications to keep consumers interested in their apps. Users are irritated by lagging and skipped frames, which negatively affects their user experience. Therefore, a feature-rich app with user behavior is required for apps to function smoothly. And for the smooth function of Applications, organizations are adopting Flutter.

Flutter has emerged as the most popular and widely used framework for creating cross-platform applications. The Dart programming language, developed by Google, powers the Flutter framework. Flutter lowers the development cost and adds flexibility to creating applications across all platforms. In light of this, Flutter is a robust framework for developing applications.

But the question is,

When compared to other hybrid platforms, does Flutter perform quickly enough? The answer is yes, but let’s move on to some excellent performance and optimization approaches from that point of view.

Flutter: An Overview

For creating high-quality, high-performing apps for Android and iOS, Flutter is a great framework. You can create stunning user interfaces for your apps using absolutely no coding. The cross-platform framework offers a wide variety of building pieces, such as UI elements, animations, and other features, to make it easier for you to create fantastic apps more quickly. That very much explains why every other company favors Flutter.

Flutter is, therefore, one of the top mobile app frameworks available in terms of Performance. It enables the creation of top-notch apps that function flawlessly on devices with modest processing power. Your software could occasionally require more optimization, though. For instance, you might want to look into shrinking the size of your app or optimizing the loading process if your app routinely crashes on older devices.

Now it’s time to look into the techniques you can use to enhance the Flutter app’s Performance, which will help you outperform your rivals.

Top Flutter Performance Optimization Tips

  • Avoid state Flutter Widgets.

Without worrying about the state, StatefulWidgets allow the creation of any UI component. However, they are more helpful if your app has a significant build() function and wants the UI to alter dynamically based on user actions while running.

When the widget’s state or input data changes, these widgets, which have an internal state, can re-render. Experts advise limiting the use of such widgets for improved performance in Flutter.

  • Break heavy build functions

Large widgets can be divided into smaller stateless ones to save having to construct them constantly. Stateless widgets don’t change frequently, so they use fewer processing resources. As a result, they are more effective and convenient to deal with.

  • Use Const Keyword

When Const is applied to a widget, all of the widget’s dependencies are initialized at compile time rather than run time. As a result, you can utilize widgets to their fullest extent while avoiding pointless rebuilds.

You must activate the resultant widgets after dividing your larger widgets into smaller sub-widgets and using stateless widgets whenever possible. You can achieve this by making your widgets use less memory. When necessary or appropriate, the Const keyword can assist reduce memory use and enhance the performance of the Flutter app.

  • Minimize layout passes caused by intrinsic operations

In contrast to other frameworks, Flutter programming strongly emphasizes layout and limitations when building a user interface. You must thus memorize these crucial guidelines: Constraints go down. Sizes expand. The parent determines the position.

Some widgets can be expensive to layout, notably grids and lists. However, Flutter aims to run a single layout pass over the widget to minimize the impact on Performance. However, the Performance can be slowed down when a second pass (sometimes referred to as an inherent pass) is required. Enabling the Track layouts option in DevTools and looking up the app’s stack trace will allow you to determine how many layout passes were made, which will help you determine if you have too many intrinsic passes.

  • Use Opacity only when necessary.

An Opacity widget causes a rebuild in every frame when you animate it directly. This wastes resources and can affect how well your animation performs. Instead, think about utilizing a FadeTransition or an excellent substitute like AnimatedOpacity.

  • Use saveLayer() thoughtfully

The pricey method savelayer() is used by the Flutter code to provide several UI visual effects. The program can become sluggish if this function is called a lot. Therefore, before putting your Flutter app’s performance in danger, you should be aware of this.

An offscreen buffer is allocated in your code when you call savelayer ().

As a result, the GPU can swap render targets while putting data into the buffer because it tries to operate as efficiently as possible. A render target transition momentarily redirects the stream before rerouting, reducing the mobile GPU’s rendering throughput.

  • Build and render in 16ms

Developers have 16ms for the structure and 16ms for the image to produce a 60hz display. However, creating and showing a frame in 16ms or less is recommended when the latency is an issue. For better flutter performance, split the 16 ms evenly between the structure and the picture, i.e., 8 ms for the structure and 8 ms for the picture (display).

The visual effect is unaffected by the display quality reduction from 16 to 8 milliseconds. This means the battery life is extended on smaller devices, and it performs better.

Key Take Away On Flutter Performance

Flutter speed optimization has always been excellent since the Flutter framework has offered much assistance in developing native and online applications. It is compatible with programs that use powerful visual effects.

However, Flutter performance tuning is required to prevent unintended mistakes and sluggish performance. Flutter adds scalability, dependability, and security to your application. If you want to optimize your flutter application, get in touch with Kody Technolab for top-notch optimization services.

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Sanjay Kidecha
Sanjay Kidecha

Written by Sanjay Kidecha

Sanjay Kidecha is the CFO of Kody Technolab. He loves to explore and write on latest Web & Mobile App Development Trends. https://kodytechnolab.com/

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