A benchmark on a real shopping app turns a heated library debate into a countable question.
Ask five Flutter developers which state library to use and you will get five confident answers. The arguments are real, but they are rarely backed by numbers from an application like the one you are building.
A 2023 study picked a harder test case than usual. The authors benchmarked GetX and Riverpod on Flutter ecommerce, an open source marketplace app from GitHub, rather than on a minimal demo. Marketplace apps stress a state manager in specific ways: long product lists, image loading, filters, and a cart that several screens depend on.
GetX is deliberately all in one. State, routing and dependency injection live in the same package, and the library tends to rebuild only the widgets that asked for a value. Riverpod takes the opposite route, building from composable providers that give finer control at the cost of more wiring.
The team measured three features under both libraries: loading the home screen, running a search, and adding an item. For each one they recorded memory usage, execution time and processor utilisation.
For a developer, those three lines map onto things users notice. Memory and execution time shape how quickly a screen appears and how smoothly scrolling feels on a mid range phone. Processor load shapes battery drain and heat, and there the two came out level.
It is worth keeping the scope in view. This is one application, one platform and three features, so it does not settle the argument in general. What it does is replace opinion with a measurement on a workload closer to production than most comparisons use.
Jatnika, Akbar and Pinandito (2023). Comparative Analysis of the Use of State Management in E-commerce Marketplace Applications Using the Flutter Framework. Journal of Information Technology and Computer Science.
