Decoding Viral App Features in Flutter: What Makes Users Stick and Pay

Crafting a Successful Flutter App

The first important thing to know is that viral Apps need both, features that make users engage and purchase within your app and also a smart and great growth strategy in place. Going viral is a combination of both.

With the rise of Flutter, an open-source framework from Google, creating engaging and revenue-generating apps has become more achievable than ever.

The right strategy for building a successful Flutter app, involves having the right team. You will need at least product managers, engineers, designers, and testers. The right strategy for app growth involves having a growth manager or growth hacker, responsible for defining the app growth strategy.

Hire a mobile app development company to support your Flutter application.

Main Benefits of Flutter

Flutter is Google’s open-source framework for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase. Powered by Dart, a language optimized for fast apps across the most important platforms: iOS and Android.

Flutter Main Benefits

• Fast: Flutter code compiles aiming to bring fast performance on any device.
• Flexible: Control every pixel to create customized, adaptive designs that look and feel great on any screen.
• Productive: Flutter’s hot reload feature allows developers to build and iterate quickly. Flutter developers can update code and see changes immediately. 
• Community: Flutter is trusted by many. It is supported and used by Google, trusted by well-known brands around the globe, and maintained by a community of global developers.

Features That Make Users Stick

In the end, we want to enable users to market your app for you. We will see that some key features will help you reach that Viral Loop for your app. But, that will be possible only if your App users are happy with your Flutter app experience. The more users become engaged, the better a viral effect you can create. A really bad strategy would be to abuse the use of “Share buttons.” Users hate that and will end up deleting your app. So what are some features that make your Flutter app users stick?

The following are some recommendations from a leading Flutter App Development Company:

App Onboarding

Remember: first impressions matter; you only get one chance to make a first impression. Using some reusable Flutter components built by its growing community or harnessing its broad widgets library, you can implement a great and user-friendly App Onboarding within 1-2 hours. Yes, in only less than 2 hours, you can implement one of the most important features when considering user engagement for your Flutter app. 

A great app onboarding needs to explain your app’s features with a step-by-step tutorial and emphasize the app’s key features and value. A well-onboarded user means a user that will stick to your app.

Personalization

Mobile users are more demanding than ever. Offering a hyper-personalization is key to driving the right message to the right user at the right time. You should use data and analytics to fully understand your app users' behavior in order to achieve this. How can you implement it easily in your Flutter app? Thanks to Google, if you are using Flutter, implementing and integrating other Google tools like Firebase are much easier compared to other solutions. Firebase Data & Analytics dashboard will help you reach and target your audience seamlessly and with the right timing for your users. 

Performance

Imagine your users experience a poor and slow app performance. They tap a button, and only after 2 seconds, your app navigate onto the next screen. The user performs a search, and your app keeps loading for more than 5 seconds. We’ve seen that many times, and trust me, that experience will definitely kill your app and will kick out your users from your app.

Flutter is a game changer in terms of performance for a Cross-platform framework. Flutter provides native application performance by using the Dart Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compiler and the Flutter engine, allowing users to experience almost a native experience. 

Flutter compiles apps to native code, meaning your app will perform just as well on iOS and Android. Your users will experience a smooth experience regardless of their operating system.

Features That Make Users Pay

Push Notifications

One of the main things you should do if you want your app to go viral is: you must reward users for sharing your app among its friends and offer them incentives to come back.

Push notifications are one of the main features that help you with incentives to make your users return to your app.
It can be very helpful to use data & analytics to send useful notifications to the right user at the right moment that motivate them to return to your app.

Your user added a product to cart, but didn’t complete the order? Send them a Push notification with an offer, so the user is motivated to open the app and complete the order.

Don’t abuse Push notifications that are worthless and annoying, otherwise, you will lose your users forever.

A great combination of other Google tools, like Firebase, can be easily integrated into your Flutter app, and you can start sending Push Notifications to your users right away.

In-App Subscriptions

This is a classic and obvious feature for most mobile app experts, but most of the time they lack the experience to define their pricing model and structure correctly, so they fail with the main goal: increase CLV(Customer Lifetime Value).

A good pricing strategy includes different pricing tiers(weekly, monthly, yearly, as an example) with great balance and discounts between the different options. Offering a free trial can be a gateway for users to purchase subscriptions. 

Pricing will depend on many factors, such as industry and region. So a deep understanding of your market is necessary before defining your pricing. Some sites like Data.ai can help you with your market research. 

Once you have your pricing model and strategy in place, the most vital thing is how you deal with churned subscribers! Do you have a strategy in place to recover those abandoned users? Sending them a great deal or offer when they cancel a subscription so that you can win back that lost subscriber.

Flutter supports the integration of subscription-based models seamlessly.

One Time Offer

One way to increase sales is to give each new user a one-time offer. You can offer a limited-time promotion to create a sense of urgency in the invitation. 

A recent strategy we’ve been testing lately includes implementing a countdown with Flutter widgets and components library, showing the users a very limited-time offer either when they open the app (home screen) or when they just place an order. This one is a well-known and well-used strategy within e-commerce apps and works pretty well. 

A discount is the most typical option, but you can offer a free gift or bonus, too, depending on your type of mobile app. The only requirement is that it needs to be something valuable to the user.

Features That Make Your Flutter App Go Viral

VIP Member Strategy

A well-used “VIP Member Strategy” combined with a well-implemented Referral system can easily make your Flutter app go viral.

What do we mean by this “VIP Member Strategy”?

So basically, you make your app users feel different, exclusive and unique, thus “VIP.” Once you have a solid user base(and a big one), your app users feel they are exclusive, and you show them that they are very valuable, you can reach virality by giving each of your users the chance to invite some (ideally 3) friends to sign up for your app (the Referral System).
Word of mouth is much more effective and cheaper than paid ads. 

Would you be more likely to download an app based on a friend's recommendation or after seeing it in a banner advertisement scrolling on Instagram? While virality isn't the main focus of an app's marketing approach, it greatly simplifies and accelerates user acquisition.

It’s important to mention something: If you want to make your users refer the app to their friends, of course, it is mandatory to have an app that really gets users engaged and happy with the user experience your app offers. You should provide value to your users every single day.

Gamification and a Reward Program

Combining this with Gamification and a Reward program can skyrocket your app and give you a winning formula. Particularly a reward system is a very effective virality tool.

A recent study from Finances Online says that Foursquare grew 10 times when it incorporated gamification in its mobile application, and a Texas bank that implemented a gamified process that taught clients about its offers and benefits increased its conversion rate from 2% to 14%, and raised customer acquisitions by 700%.

The Duolingo app uses gamification in the form of progress bars and messages rewarding the user.

After all, who doesn’t love playing a good game? The good thing about Flutter is that you can easily implement different gamification initiatives: points, badges, and leaderboards will help you make the user experience more immersive, engaging, and ultimately addictive.

And remember: keeping your users engaged will help you increase your retention rate, and that will lead your users to recommend your app to their group of friends, helping your app reach virality.

Harnessing Flutter benefits like Flexibility, Customization, and Performance make implementing all of this very easy and fast. With Flutter’s rich widget library and customization options, you can easily implement a spinning prize wheel, a leaderboard with top performers, or a progress bar filled with cute micro-animations.

Bonus Tip: App Stores Reviews

Ask your users to review your app and any positive experiences they have. Getting positive reviews within the App Stores is one of the most effective ways to push your app to a viral loop, as it will help with ASO (App Store Optimization) and will organically increase visibility and positioning in the app stores.

Final Thoughts: The Magic Behind Viral Flutter Apps

Making your app go viral is not an easy job. Creating a great app and even more time to implement effective strategies to make your app go viral can take a lot of time and effort.

You can implement some of these tips to maximize your chances to make your app to go viral: 

• Be useful and valuable to your users, this is the start of your viral loop. 
• Offer an awesome app user experience so you can engage your audience. 
• Reward both your users and their invited friends for signing up.
• Motivate users to get back to your app using Push Notifications smartly

Flutter is taking mobile app development to another level, allowing developers to build outstanding applications swiftly and in record time. With its ability to operate on native code, Flutter ensures seamless performance on various platforms, making it a top choice for both users and developers.

Combine the mentioned strategies and tips with Flutter App Development and make your app go viral, easier and faster than ever!

Additional Reading:

• Flutter Soars High: The Most Popular Cross-Platform Mobile Framework in 2023
• How to Create a Budget for App Development [With Template]
• App Development Cost Breakdown for Small Businesses