Flutter has come up as the most powerful framework for mobile and web app development. Flutter in many ways actually changed the cross platform development approach by helping to develop apps for iOS, Android, web and desktop platforms with their specific UI elements.
Here we explain some of the key reasons that explain why Flutter is setting new trends in mobile app development.
Component based and layered architecture
Does your Flutter project need building highly customised apps with less time and effort? Well, Flutter can be the best bet for such needs because if it’s layered architecture. Just because it offers developers several layers that can be tweaked separately, developers can easily incorporate changes.
Flutter also offers a very component based architecture allowing ready help with a variety of tools and widgets we will discuss later in this post. These ready to use tools allow developers to incorporate platform specific design elements and look and feel for their projects while using the same codebase.
Flutter is unarguably fast
One of the key selling points that most developers talk about when referring to Flutter is the faster performance and speed of Flutter. The performance and speed of Flutter can be attributed to various technical aspects.
- First of all, the clean and easy syntax of Dart language that is used by Flutter, helps optimise the user interface elements for each platform very easily.
- Secondly the component based structure along with platform specific tools give developers great ease in incorporating changes in different app layers without putting huge effort and investment.
- The backend powered by Firebase comes with robust support ensuring great performance.
- Thanks to component based structure, a simple and basic Flutter app can be built at lightning quick speed while keeping options of further value additions later.
- As experienced by most Flutter projects, apps built with Flutter offer a 60fps speed on almost all the devices and a lightning fast 120 fps speed on devices for which a Flutter app is specifically built and designed.
- Flutter achieves optimum speed and glitch-free performance simply by segregating the native binaries based upon graphics rendering engines. This ensures optimum loading speed and performance of apps.
Flutter is ideal for MVP development approach
The Minimum Viable Product or MVP is now the widely popular development approach to validate an app idea and bring in changes as per the user feedback over time. This approach ensures staying clear of the chances of failure as the app can incorporate new features and change the user experience through subsequent updates based on the user feedback. But the real selling point of MVP approach is keeping the development time and budget of the app low for the first release.
Flutter fits into the MVP app development approach because of the fast paced turnaround time. By offering a high-speed framework, Flutter allows building a basic platform-independent app in a quick time while keeping the options for further changes and value additions open for the future.
This is why Flutter allows an app project to pre-plan its release well in advance and release an app on multiple platforms with a single launch. The component based development approach and layered architecture easily help the Flutter developers to tweak the app with new changes and app features as subsequent updates roll out.
Flutter is easily portable across mobile, web and desktop
One of the most important value propositions that make Flutter so popular is that it offers portability not just across mobile platforms, but also for web and desktop. A business brand with the same codebase can create an app presence that works on all mobile platforms, web and desktop simultaneously.
With Flutter the cross platform development requirements are not limited to just mobile operating systems. While other cross platform frameworks like React and Xamarin are great in building a single app that works on both iOS and Android, they can’t be used to build web and desktop apps.
Moreover, Flutter now enjoys the support of Google in terms of visibility in web search results. Following the introduction of HummingBird update by Google that offers comprehensive web support to Flutter, now web apps built with this framework can target web search engine ranks besides mobile app presence.
Customization and flexibility with the widgets
The vast majority of Flutter features and functionalities are accessible rich sets of libraries or widgets. Because of these widgets and ready to use tools building custom platform and device specific app user interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX) becomes extremely easier.
The development approach based upon widgets also offers maximum ease and flexibility in respect of bringing design changes in Flutter based apps across the niches.
Flutter offers a whole range of widgets for different features and functionalities ranging from design alignment to text field, setup, container, button, listview and many more. Though this post is too short to showcase the huge number of widgets and tools offered by Flutter, here we showcase a few of them that Flutter developers find useful.
- SetState: This widget basically sends the Flutter framework notification regarding the internal state changes.
- InheritedWidget: This parent widget works to propagate information through the widget tree and notifies the flutter framework in case the data inheritance requires to be developed again.
- Provider: This is a widget that allows access to the instances through call to the create() method.
Hot Reloading
This feature of Flutter framework made it one of the most popular frameworks for Rapid App Development (RAD) projects. The feature allows developers to evaluate the changes and impacts of their code instantly through a separate window.
This instant evaluation of the changes not just makes a positive impact in faster app development, it also ensures better quality. The capability to see the changes and the impact of the app code can help developers to do away with errors instantly after developing each single element. In a way this ensures concurrent and continuous testing of the app features.
The Dart advantage
Flutter for its code uses Dart language which is loaded with multitude of UI elements that Flutter framework uses for building apps across multiple platforms. Dart accommodating a lot of UI elements coded in simple code just fits the cross platform development approach perfectly.
Dart comes with a syntax that is clean, easy to understand and friendly for streamlined programming without hitches. Dart is known for robust standardization, easy maintenance, and coding with less efforts. On top of everything, the new developers having just the knowledge of traditional language like C# or Typescript can quickly cope with Dart programming as Dart is very similar to these languages.
Another major advantage of Dart is that it is highly reactive to take care of both frontend and backend development tasks from one place with least complexities. As Dart is also an increasingly popular language for web servers, backend management for Flutter based web apps becomes much easier.
Robust IDE support
Irrespective of the complexities and size of the app, Flutter has taken the lead for building any app across the niches simply because of the wider support of multiple development environments. Flutter offers robust and extensive support for a multitude of IDEs and provides unmatched support for developing cross platform apps for all platforms and devices.
Generally, developers find it really difficult to switch from one IDE to another just because of the lack of support from within the development framework. This is where Flutter stands apart with great support to a large number of IDEs ranging from Android Studio, VC Code to IntelliJ, and many others.
Flutter for apps with high degree of customization
Since Flutter is a highly capable framework for building apps that work well simultaneously on iOS and Android platforms, it creates a lot of room for the Flutter It developers to introduce customization.
They can still use the same codebase for multiple platforms and use the single comprehensive testing for app versions on both. But along with that they can also introduce a high degree of customization as well.
Thanks to the rich repository of widgets, Flutter can deliver highly platform specific look and feel and build complex UIs while maintaining consistency across platforms.
Flutter makes custom UI design and development easier with the use of ready to use animation available in large libraries. The wide range of UI elements of Flutter helps shaping apps with a very smooth and sophisticated look for mobile apps to be rendered across multiple platforms and device screens.
The ultimate thing about the Flutter framework is that it can help building a web and desktop app besides the mobile apps for iOS and Android platforms. Flutter framework while building a cross platform app for mobile, web and desktop doesn’t compromise with the look and feel of the respective platforms and device screens.
Conclusion
So, Flutter really breaks through the common cross platform development approach with several groundbreaking and eta defining elements that other cross platform frameworks fall short of. Last but not the least, Flutter has the robust support of Google and the worldwide community of developers. We can easily believe that Flutter will lead the cross platform development space in the years to come.
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