Businesses today are operating in a tech-driven landscape. End-consumers and enterprises alike are functioning in digital-first mode. The net outcome is that app development frameworks and platforms constantly compete for mind share as businesses seek form, function, and agility.
Along those lines, one of the newer yet already popular Google-supported development frameworks, Flutter, is enticing companies to look into what it offers. In fact, in 2021 alone, 42% of cross-platform apps were developed using Flutter.
What Is Flutter?
Flutter is one of the fastest mobile app development frameworks that help developers create high-quality native apps for both iOS and Android from a single codebase. It’s free and open source, with many powerful features that make developing attractive and engaging user interfaces easy.
What Kind of Apps Can You Develop in Flutter?
Flutter is a cross-platform app development framework, so you can use it to build apps for both iOS and Android. You can also build web apps using Flutter’s web view component and develop for any platform that supports HTML5.
Many companies use Flutter to create internal apps that only run in the company’s ecosystem. For example, Google uses Flutter to create internal apps that run on its own devices, like Pixel phones and Google Home devices.
What types of apps is Flutter not suitable for?
Flutter can’t be used in all situations, though. For example, it doesn’t work well with games with heavy graphics and requires hardware-accelerated rendering. If you’re building a web or mobile app that needs to run on low-end hardware or older phones, you might want to look at another framework.
Why Use Flutter to Build Your Applications?
As elucidated above, Flutter is a mobile app SDK for building native apps for iOS and Android from a single codebase. Flutter works with existing code, is used by developers and organizations worldwide, and is free and open source. To that end, let’s explore its advantages.
1. Improved Productivity
Since Flutter is a cross-platform mobile app development framework, it provides a modern and easy-to-use developer experience. It uses a reactive framework with the concept of reactive programming. This means that the Flutter framework can easily manage large data sets and respond to changes in user behavior.
2. Easy to Learn
Flutter is easier to learn than many other mobile app development tools. It uses Dart, a modern programming language designed by Google and used in production by companies like Amazon, Target, and Alibaba. Dart is familiar to Java and JavaScript developers, so they can easily transition to Flutter. If someone’s not an app developer but wants to build apps anyway, the Flutter learning curve is pretty straightforward—they can probably get started with just a few hours of study.
3. Better Performance
Flutter apps run on the same hardware as native apps, but they’re written in Dart instead of Objective-C or Java. The result is that they have fewer bugs and perform better than their native counterparts since they don’t have to translate between languages before running on the device’s CPU or GPU (Graphics Processing Unit).
4. Lower Costs
Flutter is a powerful tool for writing cross-platform code, but it’s also an excellent option for writing code that runs on one platform. Flutter development is fast and easy to set up, so you can start immediately. Besides, businesses can build an app once and deliver it to iOS, Android, and web platforms with no extra work – thus lowering costs.
5. Robust Documentation and Strong Community
Flutter is backed by Google and has a strong community of developers. You can find the documentation for Flutter on their website, which is updated frequently and has a lot of information. Flutter has an active forum where people discuss different aspects of building applications with it, something that can immensely help those just starting out with this technology.
6. Improved Time-to-Market
The other major advantage of using Flutter is that it allows organizations to build applications faster than native Android or iOS apps courtesy of Dart — which is compiled code instead of interpreted code like most other languages used for mobile development such as Java or Swift.
7. Allows Customization
Flutter’s primary focus is to provide an easy-to-use development experience for creating high-quality apps. To achieve this, Flutter relies on widgets, which are like building blocks that make up the UI of the app. Widgets can be customized to achieve the look and feel of the app by using them in different configurations, specifying properties like color and text size, or reusing them in other ways.
8. App Usage Beyond Mobile
Flutter has been designed to be used on other platforms as well. This makes it the perfect choice for developing apps for desktop computers and tablets, and other devices, including TV sets.
9. Flutter Has Its Own Rendering Engine
Flutter uses its own rendering engine instead of using the native platform’s rendering engine. It uses Skia, an open source 2D graphics library that works on Linux, Windows, and macOS platforms. This makes it easy to develop cross-platform apps using Flutter.
10. Hot Reload Feature
Flutter comes with an in-built hot reload feature that allows you to see changes made in code without having to restart the app or build again from scratch every time you make a code change. This feature makes it uncomplicated for developers to make changes and test them out immediately without wasting time on building and rebuilding their apps repeatedly.
11. Pixel Rendering Feature
Flutter has an inbuilt pixel-perfect rendering engine that makes it possible to render components at the native resolution of the device. This feature helps improve Flutter apps’ performance, especially for mobile devices.
Drawbacks of Using Flutter
1. Finding Flutter Developers Remains Challenging
Finding experienced Flutter developers can be challenging, as the framework is still relatively new, and there are fewer developers with experience working on it than those with experience with other frameworks like React Native or Xamarin. This may mean that businesses need to find a developer willing to learn how to use Flutter before they can build the app.
2. Large File Sizes
Another drawback of Flutter is that it produces large files compared to other cross-platform tools such as React Native or Xamarin. The size of these files increases the loading time and the amount of time needed to install on users’ devices.
3. Insufficient iOS Support
As mentioned above, Flutter is a cross-platform tool that allows developers to build apps for Android and iOS, but it lacks support for older versions of iOS. For instance, if you are developing a game and need to target an older version of iOS, Flutter may be unsuitable for your needs.
4. Lacks Password Management Support
Flutter doesn’t currently support readymade password management functionality, meaning that if your app needs this functionality, you’ll be required to write it yourself or integrate it with an external library like Auth0.
Conclusion
While Flutter is undoubtedly a promising framework, it is still ironing out some kinks in its system. Ultimately, though, it seems to be fine-tuning the issues that have been present in most other cross-platform frameworks.
