While native apps provide great performance and user experience, they can be costly and time-intensive. To solve this problem, we have frameworks like React Native, Ionic, among others that enable developers to build cross-platform apps, while also maintaining a single codebase. Another such framework that has gained momentum in recent years is Google’s Flutter. Announced at the Dart Developer Summit 2016, the Flutter UI toolkit enables you to build natively compiled apps for mobile, web, and desktop using a single codebase.
Since its introduction, Flutter has seen a lot of improvements. In December last year, Flutter 1.0 was released. It came with support for new widgets, nearly twenty different Firebase services, and much more. A year later, the release of Flutter 1.12 was announced. This latest stable release includes support for Android App Bundles, iOS 13, and Dart 2.7, improved keyboard access and navigation.
Flutter has also seen considerable adoption. Google is using it internally for a number of products including Google Ads. It now boasts of global customers like Abbey Road Studios, Alibaba, Capital One, Hamilton, JD.com, Tencent among others.
Now that you have got a glimpse of Flutter and its latest features, let’s list down some of the reasons why you should choose it for your next mobile app:
#1 High performance
Most recent cross-platform app development frameworks are based on JavaScript. These allow web developers to use their existing knowledge of web technologies to create mobile apps. These frameworks, however, access platform widgets in the native realm via a bridge, and that too quite frequently, which can affect app performance.
Flutter tries to dodge these performance problems by taking a completely different route. It uses the Dart programming language behind the scenes. Dart can be compiled in both ways: just in time (JIT) and ahead of time (AOT). The JIT compiler is great for fast development cycles. The AOT compiler compiles the code to fast, predictable, native code for multiple platforms. This enables Flutter to communicate with the platform without going through a JavaScript bridge that does a context switch and also improves app startup times.
#2 Everything is a widget
Other than Dart, what also sets Flutter apart from most frameworks is that it does not have separate views, views controllers, and properties. It just has one “consistent, unified object model” called widget. Whether it is a structural element such as a button or menu, a stylistic element like a font or color scheme, everything is a widget. Some of the common widgets are Scaffold, AppBar, Container, Image, Icon, among others.
There are also widgets for Material Design and Cupertino that developers can use to easily render the UI on both iOS and Android platforms. Flutter widgets also implement the Human Interface Design specifications for iOS, allowing you get that native “feel” on iPhone and iPad as well.
Though not at par with native widgets, these look and feel good. As Flutter moves the widgets and renderer into the app, these can be easily customized and extended. The platform only needs to provide a “canvas” to render these widgets so that they can appear on the device screen, and also access to events and services. As widgets are part of the app, you can add new widgets and customize existing widgets to match your requirements.
#3 Great developer experience
One of the most liked features of Flutter is stateful hot reload. You can make changes to your Flutter app in real-time and see them appear on the screen in less than a second. This makes prototyping UIs quick and easy. This also enables new forms of collaboration where you can work with another designer and implement UI changes in real-time. Coming to development environments, developers have quite a few options to choose from including Android Studio and VS Code. Flutter also supports great CI/CD tools like Codemagic, which make the build process seamless.
#4 Gradual learning curve
While the time for learning any technology depends on the knowledge you already have, Flutter is quite easy to get started with. Most developers are able to learn and become productive with Flutter within a couple of weeks. You might think that learning a new language altogether just to use a framework can be a barrier to entry, but it is really not the case. Dart is easy to learn and has a solid core library and packages. One thing that you might take some time getting used to is doing all designing work programmatically.
Despite its differences, Flutter draws some concepts from React Native. If you are coming from a React Native background, you will find Flutter quite straightforward. Among the common concepts include immutability of the widgets, single-threadedness with event loop in each process (isolate), reactivity, among others. Flutter is also often compared with game engines like Unity as it creates an app that draws visual elements directly to the screen pixel by pixel, similar to a 3D game engine.
#5 Straightforward Firebase integration
Flutter comes with official support for Firebase with FlutterFire set of plugins. Firebase is a great Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) that offers services such as a realtime database, cloud storage, authentication, machine learning, remote configuration, and numerous other features. This essentially means that this will save you from spending time and resources on building the backend.
#6 Frontend and backend using a single language
When developing an Android app, you need to write XML for UIs and Java for the backend. This is not the case in Flutter as everything is written in a single language named Dart. Flutter also uses Dart when it comes to the styling aspects of the UI.
#7 Testing in Flutter
Flutter has a rich set of testing features that you can leverage to test apps at the unit, widget, and integration level. There is a great widget testing feature where we can create widget tests to test the UI and run them at the speed of unit tests. You can also check out the official documentation on testing Flutter apps here.
#8 A growing collection of open-source packages and libraries
With Flutter, you have an amazing list of open-source packages and libraries at your exhaust. This makes developing Flutter apps easier and faster. You have Dio, a powerful HTTP client for Dart, RxDart, a reactive functional programming library for Dart, flutter_secure_storage, a Flutter plugin to store data in secure storage, among others.
#9 An active and vibrant community
The Flutter community is growing rapidly. Also, there are many conferences and meetups happening, both online and offline, to further bring together developers passionate about learning and sharing their experiences with Flutter. In December itself we saw two major events: Flutter Interact and Flutter Live. There are many places like Stack Overflow and Google Groups where you can drop your queries and concerns and the Flutter maintainers and community will be more than happy to help.
Here’s a “ask me anything” Reddit thread that shows how involved Flutter engineers are in answering questions regarding Flutter. Also, every Wednesday many of the Flutter community members are available on Zoom at #HumpDayQandA where you can get live help with Flutter from experienced developers.
#10 Great documentation
Both Dart and Flutter are well-documented. The tutorials are packed with examples and source code that are extremely helpful. The Flutter getting started guide has detailed information on IDE setup and platform setup for both iOS and Android. You also have a number of codelabs that have you get familiar with the basics. Every Flutter widget has proper documentation and a video tutorial.
To sum it up, we can say that Flutter is far from being perfect, but its gradual learning curve, ease of use, and other reasons listed above make it a great option for creating cross-platform mobile apps.
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