Fintech, the application of digital technology to financial services, is reshaping the future of finance – a process that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated. The digitization of financial services and money creates opportunities to build more inclusive and efficient financial services and promote economic development. Fintech is rapidly transforming the financial sector landscape and blurring the boundaries of both financial firms and the financial sector.
Over the last decade, more and more private companies dealing with Fintech have appeared on the market. Fintech has built up its way toward the innovation economy. Artificial intelligence, blockchain, neobanks, and many other innovative tools have become incredibly popular.
According to the Global FinTech Adoption Index, 64% of users worldwide have used at least one fintech platform, which is growing.
Access to Fintech services isn’t more limited to desktop computers and laptops. It is now available via mobile devices as well.
Along with the rapid development of fintech, more and more convenient and popular services for crypto trading appear every day, which require a high-quality and productive mobile application.
Today we want to tell you about creating cross-platform mobile applications for token trading based on the Flutter framework.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is Google’s Open-source Technology for creating native Android and iOS apps with a single codebase. It is a complete SDK containing everything you need to build cross-platform applications. It was introduced in 2015, and the use of Flutter is getting more and more popular. This framework is suitable for building various types of applications, including the development of token trading applications.
Let's discuss the pros and cons of using Flutter to build a token trading app.
Pros of Flutter Development
Cross-platform Solution
The main Flutter advantage is cross-platforming. One code base for iOS, Android, and Web. Flutter for Web: “Share your Dart code between mobile and web applications; web is just another device target for your app.”
Ready-made and Custom Widgets for Fast UI Coding
Flutter uses ready-made widgets. It helps create a user interface utilizing these building blocks. Any object in Flutter is a widget, from a button to padding or a font. Widgets can be combined to create layouts and can be used at any level of customization.
For example, Flutter can create a flexible layout admin panel for clients. A unique feature is that it independently draws every pixel and handles gestures and animations. Unlike React Native, it doesn’t utilize OEM widgets but has in-house collections – Cupertino for iOS and Material for Android. Generally, the UI customization that usually takes the longest to finish in cross-platform development takes a minimum amount of time with Flutter.
Easy Learning to Build Apps with Flutter and Plenty of Resources to Learn
The Flutter team notes that they’ve seen people with minimal programming knowledge prototyping and building apps and also mentions that no mobile development experience is required to start with Flutter. It’s available for commercial use and has already been successfully implemented in enterprises, medium-sized agencies, and startups.
Both AOT and JIT Compilation Types
Flutter uses JIT compilation during development and switches to AOT for app release. This feature of the framework provides an increase in the speed of application launch.
High Rendering Capability
Flutter uses its rendering engine, Skia, to provide a fluid 60 frames per second on most devices and up to 120 frames per second on devices that support a 120 Hz refresh rate. This game-like rendering behavior gives Flutter an advantage over existing applications SDK regarding default performance.
Better Performance without a JavaScript Bridge
The app on a user’s device will run smoothly because Dart compiles into native code directly without the bridge.
Hot Reload Function for Instantaneous Updates
This tool is already engraved into Flutter’s architecture and doesn’t require any plugins to work. Flutter supports hot reloading, where a change in source code is applied immediately to a running app without restarting it. Hot reload elevates programmers’ productivity, helps with quick iterations, and allows you to experiment without long delays, which is especially important when developing token trading applications.
Cons of Flutter Development
Lack of Third-party Libraries
Third-party libraries and packages play a big part in automating software development for programmers and relieving the need to code everything from scratch. These libraries are primarily open-source, easily available, and pre-tested. Flutter’s official resource of free packages gets better every day, and its list of tools is still growing. Generally, we see an increase in the number of libraries every day, and this trend will continue in the future.
Dart is a Modern Object-oriented Language
Dart is an excellent language by itself — its paradigm should be familiar to most programmers, and it’s fast and object-oriented. But it often loses in popularity compared to other technologies, especially giants such as JavaScript, C#, or native Objective-C and Java.
Large File Size of Apps Created with Flutter
Developers go to great lengths to minimize the size of an app. Users have limited storage on their phones, so it’s much preferable to release an app that won’t make them delete it in favor of precious photos or a music library. The release file size of the Hello world app reached 4.7MB, and it remained much bigger than native Java (539KB) and Kotlin (550KB) apps. Although over time, as the amount of memory in mobile devices increases, this feature becomes less significant.
Why Flutter is Suitable for Building Trading Applications?
Flutter is a cross-platform framework that enables the creation of an app suitable for iOS and Android.
A few key features why Flutter is perfect for creating crypto trading applications:
1. High-quality UX. As we mentioned, Flutter has customizable widgets for fast UI coding. Native elements are familiar to the user, with smooth animation and a user-friendly interface.
Top Flutter widgets and libraries for a crypto app are provided below:
a) GetWidget is an open-source library with pre-built 1000+ UI components. It makes development faster & more enjoyable. It can customize the component as per your need.
b) VelocityX is a 100% free Flutter open-source minimalist UI Framework built with Flutter SDK to make Flutter development easier and more joyful than ever.
c) Flutter Platform Widgets - simplifying the use of both Material and Cupertino widgets with a single widget.
A widget library typically includes various widgets, each of which can be customized to meet the specific needs of a project. Sometimes these widget libraries are also known as UI frameworks, as they provide a set of reusable components, styles, and other assets that can be used to build user interfaces for Flutter apps.
2. High Performance. Unlike other frameworks, Flutter does not use intermediaries (other than the Dart virtual machine) to execute the code. Therefore, the performance of Flutter apps is equal to native solutions.
3. Fast Development. Thanks to the “hot reload,” you can see changes almost instantly after modifying something in the code. In-built Material and Cupertino widgets facilitate the creation of a native-like design.
4. Full Control. Flutter has only a thin layer of C/C++ code, whereas most of the system (compositing, animation, widgets) is written in Dart. It allows developers to easily make any possible changes providing great control over the system. 5. Coinmarket, Coinbase, and Binance APIs integrations.
Flutter applications for trading cryptocurrency allow you to see cryptocurrency prices and spot wallet balances and create a market, limit, and stop-limit orders from the spot account.
It also allows seeing open orders, order history, and trade history. All these features work in real-time, according to the user's movements and the operation of the exchange.
An example of a cryptocurrency ticker app that uses Coin Market Cap API to fetch and display a list of the Top 500 cryptocurrencies and their LIVE data.
This article describes the Dart library that connects to interact with the Coinbase Commerce API. Enables projects to connect seamlessly to Coinbase and receive payments.
An overview of the Flutter desktop application for trading cryptocurrency on the Binance exchange through its API.
Using Flutter can be created a full-fledged mobile application for trading tokens. Such a mobile application will have high performance and smooth operation due to the refresh rate of 120 frames per second. The application will analyze and provide comprehensive data on various cryptocurrencies in real time.
An intuitive UX allows users to access exchange rate charts, add coins to favorites, buy/ sell a token, see the change in the price of a token in different time frames, change application settings, and do other things related to cryptocurrency management.
Thus, Flutter is beneficial for developing a mobile application for trading tokens, as it creates an application with high performance and smooth operation, a custom interface with a flexible layout while reducing development costs and accelerating the launch time of the product.
If you need more information on the development of applications for trading tokens, don't hesitate to get in touch with Global Teams. We have been developing trading applications for more than seven years.