Flutter - The new game-changing app development framework from Google
Smartphone technology has taken over the human race. You could find everyone on their smartphones, messaging their loved ones, watching videos, watching scores of their favorite games, or watching the news. There is so much to do with this little piece of metal and plastic electronics.
Smartphones are nothing but just an expensive paperweight without applications, which make all the above-listed activities possible. If you into mobile application development, you know that there are a lot of processes and aspects involved that need to be looked into before the start of the app development process. It includes numerous cycles of meticulous planning, market research, designing, coding, and testing, before the final deployment on the app stores.
If you want to maximize the reach of your app, then you must publish it to the two most important app stores currently available, Apple’s App Store and the Android’s Play Store. While you need to code in Swift or Objective C if you want to develop an iOS app, Java or Kotlin are the languages required for an Android app. Hence, publishing your app on both these app stores requires you to build two separate apps.
Two apps mean double the effort and also double the cost as you need to hire two separate developer teams to build two different apps. This problem has been solved by cross-platform app development SDK like Flutter, which is released as an open-source product by Google.
A brief history of Flutter
Flutter was unveiled to the world by Google at the DART conference in 2015. Then after keeping it under wraps for about three years, Google finally released its stable version in December 2018. Tech heavyweights like Alibaba have already dipped their toes in Flutter as they launched apps like Xiannyu, which has more than 50 million installs now. Google even has launched its popular Google ads app in Flutter.
Flutter has quickly become popular amongst the developers, and many of them are upgrading their skills to learn the language.
Further, we’ll have a look at some features which are aiding Flutter’s raving popularity across the developer community.
Peek into the topmost features of Flutter
Better efficiency in coding
Flutter allows the developers to deploy apps on both iOS as well as Android platforms using the same code base. Hence Flutter is a code-once deploy multiple times platform. This functionality of Flutter helps the developers in building apps faster, as they do not need to waste time coding the same app twice in two different languages.
DART your way to faster apps
DART is the language on which Flutter is based. DART is relatively easy to learn if you know Java or Javascript, only a few syntaxes need to be re-learned, everything else is the same. The benefit of DART is that it makes Flutter a high-speed platform as it allows JIT(just in time) or compiling on the fly capability to DART.
The developer can also compile DART AOT(ahead of time). This functionality of DART allows Flutter to by-pass the Javascript bridge improving the compiling speeds substantially. Also, DART allows Flutter to compile into native codes.
DART accords the feature of reduced communication between the app and Flutter. This leads to faster startup times and lesser issues for the app.
Widgets
Flutter is a platform that uses widgets extensively. The UI of an app built with Flutter is smooth and easily customizable. Flutter is not dependant on the platform’s widgets; instead, it has its own extensive library of widgets. Developers have many choices due to a large number of widgets that are available with Flutter.
They can change the style of buttons or menu, font or color styles, and padding extensively and express their creativity in Flutter. As Flutter provides its own widgets; these widgets are easily compatible with Android and iOS platforms. The widgets of Flutter offers native-like performance, as they follow the material design or Cupertino design principles of Android and iOS.
Developers can even build their own widgets with Flutter.
Impressive speed of development
Flutter allows for static hot-reloading, a feature which has contributed a lot in the popularity of Flutter amongst startups. Suppose your developers have found out a bug in the code, or they just do not like the font or color of the “buy” button. Then while it would take minutes to compile the code and see the effect of changes in other platforms, with Flutter the task can be accomplished within a few seconds.
The developer makes a change while the app is running, Flutter will compile the code and display the effect of changes almost instantaneously. This means that your developer, designer, and the tester can work simultaneously to make edits in the app. If the designer does not like a certain font, then she/he can suggest edits, the developer changes the code, and they both can see the result within a few seconds.
Similarly, a tester who wants to test the app for a particular use case can do the same instantly. The developers can quickly identify and rectify a bug in the code and show the results immediately to the testers.
These multiple instances of a few minutes saved in compiling the code, add up to hours of saved time, making the development process faster.
Wrap off
Flutter is quickly altering the dynamics of mobile app development. The developers have an unprecedented level of freedom with Flutter. Building native quality hybrid apps have become reasonably easy with Flutter App Development Companies. With the technology heavyweight, Google backing it, Flutter is bound to receive all the support required to grow into a robust mobile application framework.
A fast-growing developer community is proof of Flutter’s success amongst developers, and Google is proactively promoting Flutter as the language of the future. It is high-time that you took a serious look at Flutter as a mobile app development platform.
