12 Essential Tools for the Flutter Mobile App Developer

Google's Flutter framework for cross-platform app development is a favorite among mobile cross-platform developers, and with good reason. Although Flutter has matured at a quick pace thanks to Google's strong support, it still does not enjoy very many third-party app development tools. A good Flutter mobile app development tool should integrate seamlessly with the framework, automate repetitive tasks, and provide clear insights that help improve app performance or development workflow. There are a number of good Flutter mobile development tools that aren't Firebase and in this post, we will take a look at some of the top tools available to mobile teams using Flutter.

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Panache is an open-source, browser-based material theme editor for Flutter that allows you to create beautiful and highly customizable themes for your Flutter app. With this Flutter development tool, you can customize the colors of your components and widgets, and export your theme as a themes.dart file.

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Supernova is a powerful design-to-code tool that converts your Sketch and Adobe XD mobile designs into native front-end code for iOS, Android, React Native, and of course, Flutter. When you import your app design, Supernova also handles asset creation and de-duplication and allows you to edit the design and view the code changes in real-time. Supernova is currently only available as a Mac app but is soon coming to the cloud.

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Codemagic is the first Flutter focused CI/CD tool created by Nevercode. It can easily recognize your Flutter app and integrates with all your favorite tools to automate your whole build, test, release pipeline. Codemagic is also quite affordable at 500 free mac mini build minutes a month and a pay-as-you-go plan for extra minutes.

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Sylph is an open-source command-line tool created by Maurice McCabe that is essentially a wrapper around the AWS device farm. With Sylph, you can run Flutter integration and end-to-end tests on hundreds of real iOS and Android devices at a time in the AWS device farm.

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Amplitude is a well-known in-app analytics tool that helps you understand how your users are interacting with your app. It is now a popular Flutter developer tool that helps you track and monitor a wide range of data and integrates with all the popular mobile app development to allow you to take action based on your data.

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Count.ly is an open-source analytics tool with a focus on the security and privacy of your data. The free version of Count.ly allows you to track the basic metrics and KPIs that show how your app is performing, but they also offer a paid version with a more extensive set of metrics as well as other features. The paid version of Count.ly can be hosted on-premise or in the cloud and offers extra feature flags, A/B testing, and push notification features.

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AppsFlyer is a mobile attribution tool that helps you understand where your users are coming from and attribute app installs to specific marketing campaigns. It helps you understand how your marketing channels and campaigns are performing across devices and apps in one dashboard and integrates with more than 6000 media partners.

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Instabug is a mobile-first app performance platform that helps mobile teams test new features, improve app performance and experience, and collect actionable feedback across the entire app lifecycle. Instabug's products include Bug Reporting, Crash Reporting, App Performance Monitoring, Session Replay, Release Management, App Ratings and Reviews, and In-App Surveys.

Bug Reporting enables your users to effortlessly report bugs they encounter, without leaving the app. Instabug automatically grabs a screenshot that can be annotated and blurred by your users and captures comprehensive logs and device details to help you find and fix issues faster.

Crash Reporting detects every crash and stability issue occurring in your app and provides you with all the information you need to fix them. Additionally, Instabug's intelligent crash grouping and powerful alerts and rules engine automate issue assignment and triage while notifying you about critical issues in real time.

App Performance Monitoring tracks your app's performance and user experience, from app launches and screen loading to network latency and execution traces. Moreover, Instabug's Apdex score provides a north-star metric that encompasses all your performance metrics to give you an overall view of your app's experience.

Session Replay records all of your app's sessions enabling you to see through your user's eyes and view their exact experience while looking under the hood at your app's stability, performance, and logs. You can filter your sessions by performance, user email or ID, date, and more to find the most important sessions to replay and easily resolve stubborn, hard-to-reproduce issues.

Release Management helps you track the health of your releases, automate version rollout, and monitor how new versions perform on the app store. Besides giving you a detailed view of the stability and performance of each of your app's versions, Instabug enables you to schedule your rollouts and automatically pause unhealthy releases or accelerate healthy ones.

App Ratings and Reviews tracks your app's performance on the app store and turns app store reviews into actionable feedback by enabling you to replay the app sessions behind them. You can replay the app session the review was submitted from or view all of the user's sessions to understand the exact experience behind their feedback.

In-App Surveys enables you to proactively gather actionable feedback from your users about the app's features, performance, and customer experience. Additionally, Instabug helps you connect qualitative and quantitative feedback by enabling you to replay the user sessions of each survey respondent to understand their exact experience.

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Airship is a customer engagement platform that allows you to send push notifications and in-app messages to your users to engage them and improve their conversion. It also allows you to create an in-app message center that creates an in-app inbox where you can send persistent messages to your users.

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WonderPush is another push notification and in-app messaging tool that you can use in your Flutter app to boost the engagement of your users. It offers a lot of powerful features including segmentation and targeting, geo-targeting, and A/B testing for a very affordable price.

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RevenueCat is an in-app purchases and subscription management tool with support for iOS, Android, and Stripe. With this tool, you can easily create and manage in-app purchases and subscriptions with RevenueCat doing all the heavy lifting and handling the billing infrastructure. It also tracks how your app is performing by measuring LTV, MRR, churn, and more out of the box.

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Square is an in-app payment solution that handles all the complexities that come with processing payments for you. With their Flutter SDK, you can start receiving in-app payments through an easily customizable UI with support for digital wallets and stored cards for quick checkout.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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Which tool is best for Flutter app development?

You can choose tools based on your needs—such as Codemagic for CI/CD, Instabug for monitoring, and Supernova for design-to-code conversion. Instabug shines brightest in delivering mobile-specific observability and performance monitoring, making it your best option for ensuring app stability and rapid issue resolution.

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Can Flutter create iOS apps?

Yes, Flutter supports cross-platform development, enabling you to build native iOS apps from a single codebase.