Hello Flutter friends! Over the past few months, I decided to build the entire animation part of a mobile app using Flutter. At first, I had a fear that "Animations are great but performance might crash." So, I did a few tests to make sure everything worked smoothly.
In my first project, I used Hero transitions and complex vectors I drew with custom painter. While doing this, I tried to keep the widget tree as simple as possible. Especially, managing state with ValueNotifier and Provider instead of setState significantly reduced the redrawing cost. What made me realize this was observing FPS drops while testing the app on a device. At this point, opening the "Performance" tab in Flutter DevTools and analyzing the raster time was really helpful.
Another tip of mine was defining animations as "Explicit" rather than "Implicit." For example, when I controlled animations using AnimationController and Tween instead of AnimatedContainer, I had full control over the duration, curve, and stopping of the animations. I also tried the "flutter_animate" package, which greatly reduced code repetition.
Of course, performance isn't limited to just animations. To minimize the overall size of the app, I used the "flutter build apk --split-per-abi" command. This reduced the APK size by about 20% since unnecessary native libraries were excluded from the app package.
Now, let’s get to a question: What techniques or packages do you prefer to improve animation performance in Flutter? I’d especially love to hear about the challenges you’ve faced in large-scale projects and how you solved them. Buddy, share your experiences and suggestions so we can build a smoother Flutter ecosystem together!
How I Achieved Realistic Animations and Balanced Performance with Flutter? My Experiences and Tips, Bro
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Compared to React Native, Flutter's custom-rendering layer ensures more stable animation frame rates, with almost no stuttering—especially when using Hero or CustomPainter. In contrast, native Android often suffers from UI thread blocking with complex vector animations unless RenderThread is manually optimized. If you've already controlled the drawing scope in Flutter using RepaintBoundary, the performance can even match that of native iOS animations.
Listen, you've built some pretty heavy graphics with Hero transitions and CustomPainter, which definitely helps with visual effects. But have you tried wrapping those widgets with `RepaintBoundary` to limit the repaint scope? This small change often leads to noticeable improvements in frame rate, especially when animations like scrolling or screen rotation are active.
Another question – how are your animations performing on low-end devices? If you're updating the UI directly with `setState` instead of using `AnimatedBuilder`, the CPU overhead can increase. In such cases, you might get better results by reducing unnecessary frame draws using `TickerMode` or `SchedulerBinding.instance.addPostFrameCallback`. Which devices have you deployed this performance on, and did the `PerformanceOverlay` reveal any bottlenecks?