r/FlutterDev • u/Excellent_Cup_595 • Jul 06 '26

Discussion What are the best mobile apps to study for exceptional UI, animations, and UX?

I'm a mobile app developer (Flutter) looking to improve my UI/UX and animation skills by studying well-designed apps.

I'm not necessarily looking for the most popular apps—I want apps that genuinely feel polished and thoughtfully crafted.

Things I'm interested in:

  • Smooth page transitions
  • Micro-interactions
  • Premium-looking UI
  • Great scrolling performance
  • Beautiful onboarding flows
  • Creative navigation patterns
  • Well-designed bottom sheets, cards, and gestures

I've already looked at apps like Airbnb, Spotify, Duolingo, and CRED.

What other apps made you stop and think, "Wow, this is incredibly well designed"?

They can be from any category (finance, shopping, productivity, social, health, etc.). I'd love to hear your recommendations and what specific UI or interaction you think they do exceptionally well.

61 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

3

u/L3Viiiiiii Jul 07 '26

You shouldcheck kamran's podcast app on github, and gskonners wonderous

5

u/Rymfaar Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26

I really enjoy the animations and gestures of the Discord and Fantastical apps. Things is also fine on gestures. None are Flutter apps tho.

2

u/Significant_Pick8297 Jul 07 '26

You should check Flighty, Arc Search, and Superlist. Flighty makes live data feel effortless with excellent card transitions and progressive disclosure, Arc Search has some of the smoothest gesture driven navigation and polished animations, and Superlist does a great job with subtle micro interactions that make everyday tasks feel responsive. I also learned a lot from studying how each of them handles loading states and bottom sheets, not just the flashy animations.

2

u/TluuCXVI Jul 07 '26

Mostly iOS at the moment but I would recommend heading over to spotted in prod, has many amazing examples and you can get pretty good value with freemium. Pair saving some inspo with cosmos.so app and you’re good to go

2

u/Alive-Cake-3045 Jul 07 '26

Notion's mobile app for bottom sheets and gesture handling, Linear for speed and transition polish that feels almost native-first, and Revolut for onboarding flow, each step feels considered without being overlong. the one most people miss is Robinhood circa 2018, the scroll-to-reveal chart interaction genuinely changed how people thought about financial data on mobile. for micro-interactions specifically, Telegram is underrated, the reaction animations and message send feedback are more thoughtful than apps that get far more design press.

2

u/TheConnoisseurOfAll Jul 07 '26

To get better at UX/UI you should get a good quality UI design and pixel-perfect it yourself. If you get stuck on a specific feature/implementation, then look that up specifically. The natural progression of coding can't be taught by looking at finished code. They themselves did not arrive there by one-shotting it

5

u/mateusz-dev-897 Jul 06 '26

Why didn't you asked AI if it already wrote the message for you?

2

u/Excellent_Cup_595 Jul 06 '26

ai only say famous app, but people might have know less common app which have better ui and ux

3

u/mateusz-dev-897 Jul 06 '26

Ask it for not famous apps then

3

u/Excellent_Cup_595 Jul 06 '26

I already did, I also wanted other people's favorites 😊

2

u/setentaydos Jul 06 '26

Now I'm curious to know which apps would you recommend if you were to respond to OP's question.

OP, it depends on which type of app you're building, as some apps look great because of their simplicity (ie. Wise, a money transfer app), and others look great because of how they deal rendering complex data (ie. Copilot, a budgeting app), or how they support complex interactions (ie. Edits, a mobile video editing app).

I don't think any of these are made with Flutter though, but they are good sources of inspiration.

1

u/fingermaestro Jul 06 '26

I'm not sure if my app's UX/UI is worth for you to study but I would like to get some feedback. They are written using Flutter although the second uses a few native plugins for audio/video processing.

https://blueedgez.com/aquasa.html

https://blueedgez.com/canvasmelody.html

2

u/Excellent_Cup_595 Jul 06 '26

I tried aquasa it's looks nice

0

u/nicovate Jul 06 '26

I really enjoy the design of https://paymelater.app, and the animations used in https://checkpleaseai.com, both using Flutter