Flutter is a robust cross-platform framework for building apps for mobile, web, desktop, and embedded devices. However, it’s currently used most commonly for mobile apps. This post will cover several of the best options for monitoring your Flutter mobile apps, so your teams can choose the perfect tooling for building the best Flutter app!

Flutter overview

Flutter is Google’s portable UI software development kit (SDK) for crafting natively compiled mobile, web, and desktop applications. It offers a complete environment with a framework, widgets, and tools.

Flutter is open-source, free, and powered by Dart, a client-optimized language for fast apps on any platform. Combined, these allow you to develop apps efficiently and quickly. In addition, the architecture and engineering design of Flutter enables building responsive and user-friendly applications.

The benefits of using a mobile monitoring tool for Flutter

Many mobile teams lack insight into the benefits of monitoring their Flutter app with a mobile performance monitoring tool. Below are a few reasons why mobile monitoring tools are helpful for you and your business.

More informed decisions

By having complete visibility into your mobile app, you can make better-informed decisions that positively affect your user’s in-app experience. Through mobile monitoring tools, your mobile teams have complete visibility into their user data so they can immediately be notified of issues and collaborate across teams to solve them proactively.

Faster detection and problem-solving

It’s essential to stay updated when a problem occurs and know what led to it. With mobile monitoring tools, you can easily track metrics beyond crashes and errors and see what led to a user drop-off or a specific user action. As a result, you can remediate issues quickly, save time and money, and prevent user churn.

Increased user retention

Your retention rate is the most critical metric to your app being successful. The math is simple: the more users you keep, the better your revenue potential. Unfortunately, good retention rates are notoriously hard to maintain. Industry-wide, 73% of users uninstall an app after just 90 days. With mobile monitoring tools, you’re alerted of issues before they affect your users and your bottom line. As a result, you can prevent user churn and increase user retention by proactively combatting user-facing issues.

The best Flutter monitoring tools

It’s challenging to decide which Flutter tool to choose when monitoring your mobile app. To help, we’ve rounded up some of the best Flutter monitoring tools below and provided a helpful rundown of each.

Embrace

Embrace background

Embrace is a unified mobile monitoring and observability platform built to help mobile teams deliver seamless user experiences. Unlike traditional monitoring approaches, Embrace collects comprehensive technical data from every session, so teams can quickly identify, prioritize, and solve any business-impacting issue. Embrace partnered with Very Good Ventures to build a Flutter SDK that used structures, terminology, and standards tailored to developers familiar with Flutter.

Flutter SDK details

Embrace’s Flutter SDK provides the following:

  • Automatic crash reporting
  • Custom session events (i.e. breadcrumbs)
  • Instant user lookup to review sessions when troubleshooting issues
  • Errors in Dart code and Android/iOS
  • Stack traces for errors
  • Automatic detection and reporting for ANRs
  • ANR root cause detection with stack trace flame graphs
  • Custom key user moment tracking, including timing, errors, and user abandons
  • Logs
  • Network requests
  • Startup time performance and user abandonment tracking
  • User terminations
  • Dart symbol file upload

A few of our notable features include:

  • 100% of user sessions: Embrace captures 100% of all user sessions. This makes problem-solving easy, with all the information you need about your end-user experience at your disposal.
  • Moments: Moments track critical user flows to understand where these flows are running slow, ultimately leading to user frustration and app abandonment.
  • Real-time custom dashboards: Teams can track the metrics they care about, including performance, stability, adoption, engagement, and feature health.
  • Proactive alerts: Teams can be immediately alerted to regressions in performance and stability metrics. In addition, they can set custom alerts at the thresholds and time windows to eliminate noise and focus on the issues that matter.

Drawbacks

Embrace is a mobile-only solution, making it the perfect solution for app developers but not for teams who are also using Flutter for web. While Embrace does not offer backend monitoring, it does offer several solutions for viewing mobile data outside the core platform, including integrations with backend monitoring solutions, a data source plugin for popular visualization tools like Grafana, and a Metrics API that can be queried from any Prometheus monitoring solution. While Embrace’s Flutter SDK only supports Android and iOS, it’s built with a federated plugin architecture, allowing support for other platforms to be added in the future without overhauling any existing plugin code.

AppDynamics

AppDynamics background

AppDynamics is a backend and application performance monitoring (APM) platform that focuses on end-to-end customization. Their tooling helps optimize businesses’ application performance, user experience, and business outcomes to achieve comprehensive visibility.

Flutter SDK details

AppDynamics’s Flutter SDK provides the following:

  • Network requests
  • Automatic crash reporting
  • Screen tracking
  • Automatic detection and reporting of ANRs
  • Custom user flow tracking
  • Errors and custom metrics reporting
  • Automatic capture of screenshots and user touch-points (iOS only)
  • Custom user data on network requests, crash reports, or sessions
  • Report breadcrumbs to track UI widgets or custom user interactions
  • Timers to track events that span across multiple methods.
  • Mark method execution as info points
  • Split app instrumentation into multiple sessions
  • Automatically report device metrics (memory, storage, battery) and connection transition events

A few of their notable features include:

  • Custom tracking for user flows: Appdynamics uses the SessionFrame mechanism to track custom user flows to give you complete visibility into how users are interacting with different aspects of your app.
  • Screen tracking: Appdynamics provides Screen tracking via NavigationObserver and WidgetTracker, allowing you to track user screen transitions to know where and when an error occurred.

Drawbacks

AppDynamics provides limited reporting and analysis for ANRs. In the AppDynamics platform, ANRs are reported alongside other code issues, have limited filter metrics, and cannot be organized in flame graphs. Additionally, AppDynamics’s alerting is only available for crashes and code issues. Moreover, Appdynamics’ Flutter SDK does not offer automatic network capture or various UI views and interactions.

BugSnag

BugSnag background

BugSnag is a stability monitoring solution that provides rich, end-to-end error reporting and analytics to reproduce and fix errors quickly. Bugsnag supports the full stack with open-source libraries for 50+ platforms, including Flutter.

Flutter SDK details

The BugSnag Flutter SDK provides the following:

  • Stack traces
  • Unhandled and handled errors
  • ANRs and fatal app hangs
  • Out-of-memory terminations
  • Thermal kills
  • Sending diagnostic data
  • Identifying users
  • Logs
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Session tracking
  • Feature flags
  • Identifying crashes at launch

A few of their notable features include:

  • Reporting ANRs and fatal app hangs: When the main thread of an Android app is blocked for too long, it appears unresponsive, and the Android OS creates an Application Not Responding (ANR) error. Detection of these “fatal” app hangs is enabled by default as part of the BugSnag SDK. You can also report non-fatal app hangs (i.e. hangs that did not result in the app being killed) by configuring a minimum app threshold hang duration.
  • Identifying users: BugSnag includes helpers attaching an identifier, email address, and name to searchable reports in the dashboard. By default, they generate a unique ID and send this ID along with every error report from an individual device.
  • Declaring feature flags and experiments: Monitor errors as you roll out features or run experiments and A/B tests by displaying your feature flag and experiment usage in the BugSnag client. Additionally, you can use the features dashboard to identify whether these features have introduced errors in your app.

Drawbacks

BugSnag does not provide data on every user session. As a result, you cannot look up users to review every session in complete detail. This can create a longer time to resolution, and a more complicated debugging process as developers try to recreate issues. Moreover, BugSnag’s Flutter SDK requires you to capture network requests as custom breadcrumbs, add a package to the Flutter app, and instrument it.

Datadog

Datadog background

Datadog is an observability service for cloud-scale applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services through a SaaS-based data analytics platform.

Flutter SDK details

The Datadog Flutter SDK uses Real User Monitoring (RUM) to enable you to visualize and analyze the real-time performance and user journeys of your Flutter applications with the following:

  • Logs
  • RUM on network requests, errors, crash reports, or sessions
  • RUM event modifications or drops
  • RUM offline device data sends

A few of their notable features include:

  • Sending data when a device is offline: RUM ensures the availability of data when your user’s device is offline. In cases of low-network areas or when the device battery is too low, all RUM events are stored on the local device.
  • Enrich user sessions with RUM: Flutter RUM automatically tracks attributes such as user activity, views, errors, native crashes, and network requests.

Drawbacks

Datadog’s Real User Monitoring (RUM) launch is new and less polished than its competitors. In most cases, the Datadog platform tells you what’s wrong with your app but can’t provide much data on how to solve the issue. It heavily relies on third-party products to produce accurate end-to-end insights. Moreover, Datadog’s Flutter integration doesn’t include built-in metrics. Instead, it requires you to set up your own custom metrics. However, it automatically sends traces, RUM events, and gives you a mechanism to send logs.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace background

Dynatrace is an observability platform that allows users to innovate faster, operate more efficiently, and drive better business outcomes with observability, AI, automation, and application security in one platform. In addition, Dynatrace offers end-to-end monitoring from the user’s device down to the database query on your backend.

Flutter SDK details

The Dynatrace Flutter SDK provides the following:

  • Crash analysis
  • Error reporting
  • User behavior analysis
  • Business value insights
  • Rollout monitoring
  • Performance monitoring

A few of their notable features include:

  • User actions: Dynatrace Davis – their AI tool – learns your app’s regular overall usage patterns. It then calculates baselines for user action occurrences and durations. When Davis detects deviations from this baseline (e.g., a sudden dip in usage or a user action that lasts longer than expected), it generates a problem event, identifies the root cause of the problem, and sends notifications based on the configured alerting profile. So, for example, you can see if user interactions are fast enough, which ones are lagging, and, if they are lagging, immediately determine why.
  • Rollout monitoring: Dynatrace offers a built-in release-analysis solution that helps you determine which versions are deployed across your deployment stages and production environments based on multiple version-detection strategies, the release stages of the deployed versions, known bugs and whether they’re release-blockers, how the new version is behaving compared to previous versions, and more.

Drawbacks

Dynatrace has limitations to the detail it collects surrounding app and device state. This means developers may lack vital context when seeking to understand a user’s problems. Additionally, Dynatrace doesn’t cover ANRs or OOMs. Moreover, Dynatrace’s Flutter SDK requires complete manual instrumentation of the Flutter layer using an API.

Firebase

Firebase background

Firebase is a Google-backed app development platform for building and growing apps and games.

Flutter SDK details

The Firebase Flutter SDK provides the following through Firebase Flutter plugins:

  • Analytics
  • App Check
  • Authentication
  • Cloud Firestore
  • Cloud Functions
  • Cloud Messaging
  • Cloud Storage
  • Crashlytics
  • Dynamic Links
  • In-App Messaging
  • Firebase installations
  • ML Model Downloader
  • Performance monitoring
  • Realtime Database
  • Remote Config

A few of their notable features include:

  • Google Analytics: Firebase’s analytics collects usage and behavior data for your app. The SDK logs two primary types of information, events (log what is happening in your app, such as user actions, system events, or errors) and user properties (define segments of your user base, such as language preference or geographic location). Additionally, analytics automatically logs events and user properties, so you don’t need to add any code to enable them.
  • Cloud Storage: Cloud Storage for Firebase lets you upload and share user-generated content, such as images and video, which allows you to build rich media content into your apps. Your data is stored in a Google Cloud Storage bucket with high availability and global redundancy. Moreover, Cloud Storage allows you to securely upload files directly from mobile devices and web browsers, efficiently handling spotty networks.

Drawbacks

Firebase is limited in the data they automatically provide. Beyond crashes, extracting actionable data tends to be a manual process. Custom metrics, logs, network monitoring, and events must be instrumented by hand, which is time-intensive and introduces the potential to produce blind spots in your data. Moreover, Firebase’s automatic screen rendering performance monitoring is not possible for individual Flutter screens. A single view controller natively encapsulates your entire Flutter application, so the underlying native Firebase SDK is unaware of screen transitions.

Instabug

Instabug background

Instabug is a mobile app performance monitoring tool that empowers mobile teams to monitor, prioritize, and debug performance and stability issues throughout the app development lifecycle.

Flutter SDK details

The Instabug Flutter SDK provides the following:

  • Bug reporting
  • Crash reporting
  • App performance monitoring
  • In-app replies
  • In-app surveys
  • Feature requests
  • Logs

A few notable features include:

  • In-app replies and surveys: Instabug users can send in questions, feedback, bugs, and surveys, and developers can reply to them.
  • Feature requests: Similar to in-app replies and surveys, you can use Instabug Feature Requests to have users submit feature ideas, vote and comment on other requests, and see the status of each submitted idea right inside your app.

Drawbacks

Instabug struggles with user experience monitoring. If you’re looking to discover when and why your users are abandoning or force quitting your app, you won’t be able to find those measurements with Instabug. Moreover, Instabug’s Flutter SDK requires manual instrumentation for the app when setting up crash reports, and while it does support most native features, a few are still not supported.

Sentry

Sentry background

Sentry is a self-hosted and cloud-based application performance monitoring and error tracking platform that helps software teams see clearer, solve quicker, and learn continuously.

Flutter SDK details

The Sentry Flutter SDK provides the following:

  • Automatic native crash error tracking
  • Offline storage of events
  • Events enriched with device data
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Release health tracks crash-free users and sessions
  • Attachments enrich your event by storing additional files, such as config or log files
  • User feedback
  • Performance monitoring
  • Logging integration
  • Screenshot attachments for errors
  • View hierarchy attachments for errors

A few notable features include:

  • Release health: You can monitor the health of releases by observing user adoption, usage of your application, percentage of crashes, and session data. Release health data provides insight into the impact of crashes and bugs related to user experience and reveals trends with each new issue through the release details, graphs, and filters.
  • User feedback: When a user experiences an error, Sentry can collect additional feedback directly in the app.

Drawbacks

Sentry may not be the best fit for you if mobile is your primary focus. Sentry’s mobile offering doesn’t work seamlessly out of the box, meaning you must dedicate time to log instrumentation. In addition, Sentry’s data lacks context for issues affecting the user experience. Moreover, Sentry’s Flutter SDK doesn’t provide human-readable dart stack traces. Sentry also has two different SDKs – one for Flutter and one for Dart, meaning you have to implement both to get what you need from their Flutter offering.

Other Flutter tools

While monitoring your mobile app is extremely important, it’s not the only thing that matters when it comes to delivering a successful Flutter app. This section will cover several tools to help you design, build, manage data, and more within your Flutter apps.

Best Flutter design tools

The ability to completely customize your mobile apps makes Flutter an extremely desirable tool for mobile developers. Below are some design tools that help you build unique and beautiful mobile applications.

Often considered one of the best Flutter app development tools, Panache lets you make customized themes for your Flutter apps. You can experiment with different shapes, colors, and themes and export .dart files to your Google Drive folder. Panache is currently used by over 40 million Flutter mobile app developers, and it’s the perfect choice for creating appealing themes for your users.

Another popular design tool is Supernova. It lets you tightly sync the design and code of all components, patterns, tokens, and themes in real-time. It’s one of the most interoperable tools in the market, allowing you to fix the fonts, colors, and other components across the app on multiple platforms and drive collaboration across teams. In addition, it expands app development visibility by connecting DesignOps and DevOps.

Moreover, it aids design editing and updates to code changes in real-time. Supernova can customize every component, style, and screen with just a front-end code snippet in the application.

Best Flutter state management tools

When developing Flutter apps, state management is one of the most crucial aspects, allowing developers to track all UI changes a user makes. Mobile app development depends on it, from the web to desktop to mobile. However, keeping data and information in sync takes a great deal of time and effort. Thus, a Flutter state management library is a necessity.

BLoC is recommended by Google and is one of the most popular approaches to state management. The BLoC pattern allows one to separate all Flutter application logic into a single component.

BLoCs are assigned to each screen in Flutter applications. Using this approach, you can separate the presentation code from the business logic to make it easier to test and reuse. In addition, developers can efficiently work on the same codebase using uniform patterns and conventions.

Another popular state management tool is Provider. The Provider Pattern is a straightforward way to manage the state within Flutter applications. It provides a simple and efficient way to access and modify the application’s state while making the code more maintainable and testable.

Lastly, one of the newer state management solutions for Flutter is Riverpod. This tool builds on top of the Provider Pattern. It provides additional features such as dependency injection, reactive programming, and more. It was created by the developer of the Provider package and was designed to make state management easier to understand, maintain, and test. It is becoming increasingly popular for Flutter projects. With Riverpod, a state can be accessed and modified from anywhere in the code, making it easier to keep the code consistent and maintainable.

Best Flutter IDE tools

An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that helps programmers develop software code efficiently. An IDE can improve your development experience if you choose the right one for your needs.

Recommended by developers and known as the most efficient IDE for Flutter development, Visual Studio Code comes equipped with a vast plugin system and a large number of functionalities. Web app developers prefer this IDE for Flutter application development because of the Git control and terminal, debugging, plugins that simplify app development, and more.

Many developers also recommend the Android Studio IDE because it allows you to create highly efficient apps. It provides code completion features, syntax highlighting, and widget editing assistance. In addition, the Android Studio plugin in Flutter lets you build and run Flutter apps on an Android emulator or device, preventing the need to download and install Android Studio.

Lastly, IntelliJ IDEA is another good option for Flutter development. This IDE shares the same foundation as Android Studio. Sometimes, particular fixes or problems are resolved in IntelliJ IDEA before they are resolved in Android Studio, so consider using it if you are experiencing a specific issue that has yet to be fixed in Android Studio. As for performance, IntelliJ reflects the performance features of Android Studio.

Best Flutter CI/CD Tools

A CI/CD pipeline makes the automatic delivery of your software more frequent, reliable, and secure. In addition, it focuses on higher code quality, which is why it’s vital for a mobile developer or team.

Codemagic is considered one of the most effective CI/CD tools. Codemagic will help you evaluate and launch your applications and market your software without any difficulty. If you use Codemagic to launch your app, you won’t need to configure anything. Codemagic’s automation capabilities allow you to test and build your product seamlessly.

Another one of the best CI/CD tools that offer mobile-first features that are instrumental in building, testing, and deploying mobile apps at an accelerated pace is Bitrise. It’s a cloud-based CI/CD tool that eliminates the need to invest in expensive hardware. In addition, it is free to use for individual mobile-app developers and open-source projects.

Lastly, Fastlane is an open-source tool suite that automates releases and deployments for Android and iOS apps. Many developers favor it because it can significantly reduce deployment time when working with complex Android and iOS apps.

The future of Flutter

Flutter’s the new kid on the block, but it’s growing exponentially, as shown through all the exciting new updates and up-and-coming features throughout 2023. With over 500,000 apps built with Flutter since August of 2022, a growing ecosystem of over 24,000 packages to help you add functionality to your Flutter applications, and over 2 million Flutter developers over the past three years, Flutter development has nowhere to go but up, let’s take a look at some of the most exciting feature updates for the coming year.

The newest major Flutter release previewed at the Flutter Forward conference was Dart 3 alpha. This latest update includes new language features, the completion of Flutter’s multi-year journey to sound null safety, and expanded platform support.

Moreover, Flutter has many new and up-and-coming features developers have been asking for, including vertical toolkits, updates to the Wonderous app, calling native platform methods directly from Dart, the new rendering engine Impeller, and 3D in Flutter with Impeller.

Flutter is future-proof

A recent article posted by Volo Global discussed the idea of Flutter being “future-proof.” This idea referenced Google’s ability to release constant updates of Flutter, with increasingly better features, improved functionalities, and smoother performance.

With Flutter, you can now create apps for six different platforms from a single codebase. In addition, with a more robust integration with Firebase, real-time crash reporting service updates, and an increasing number of Vertical Toolkits to help you get started in development, these updates set Flutter’s future in stone — it’s here to stay.

Flutter is supported by its massive community of developers and the many companies that create SDKs to support it. In addition, because it’s open source, Flutter developers can contribute to the SDK’s development by adding new code or documentation, writing books and guides, and carrying out training courses, events, and user groups. Flutter’s future looks as bright as ever, so get started today with the Flutter monitoring tool that works best for you and your company’s needs!

At Embrace, we’re so excited about the future of Flutter. We’ve recently launched our Flutter SDK in beta, so if you are looking for best-in-class monitoring for your Flutter mobile apps, check us out!