7 Ways Flutter is Setting the Trend in Mobile App Development

Be it shopping on Alibaba, running an ad campaign on Google Ads, or making payments via Google Pay – we’ve all used apps made by Flutter. This new cross-platform app development framework is taking the market by storm, as it offers better experiences to both developers and users.

Backed by IT behemoth Google, Flutter app development services is gaining serious traction among the coding community. ‘Code once, use everywhere’ is the new buzzword in the global IT industry, as hybrid apps are fast turning into a necessity. Enterprises increasingly prefer hybrid mobile app development services over their native counterparts, as they significantly cut down development time and costs.

Flutter app development is emerging as a leading hybrid solution in the mobile app development marketplace, as this open-source technology gains acclaim for building stable and user-friendly apps and ensuring fast time-to-market for businesses. Let’s look under the hood to discover why Flutter is the future of cross-platform mobile app development.

 

What is Flutter?

Built by Google, Flutter is an open-source technology for creating web, mobile, and desktop apps from a single codebase. Unlike other mobile app development services, Flutter is not a framework or a library – it’s a complete software development kit (SDK) that includes a rendering engine, ready-made widgets, testing, and integration APIs.

It provides developers with an easy solution to build and deploy visually attractive and natively-compiled applications, as Flutter app development combines ease of development with improved app performance, without compromising the visual consistency between platforms.

 

Why Flutter is the Bold New Contender in the App Development Space

Released in 2017, with a stable version appearing as recently as December 2018, Flutter is the newest player in the market for cross-platform mobile frameworks. Even then, it’s fast becoming famous for many things, other than its association with the Big Daddy of IT, Google.

Google’s stated aim is to position Flutter as a tool that lets Flutter app developers, “build beautiful native apps on iOS and Android from a single codebase.” The programming language that lies at the foundation of Flutter is Dart, which is easy to learn and comparable with Java, JavaScript, C++, and C#. Like all open-source platforms, developers can contribute to the Flutter platform and share free plug-ins.

Flutter also provides the ability to create pure-native components for apps, resulting in increased flexibility for developers. Also, being a cross-platform toolkit, it significantly decreases development costs, efforts, and time.

 

How Flutter Works

Being an SDK, Flutter offers a wider work scope to developers, with its collection of tools, including libraries, documentation, and APIs. It contains everything necessary to build cross-platform applications.

 

Let’s look at Flutter’s main Architectural Layers:

• An Embedder uses a platform-specific language and makes the app run on any operating system.
• The Engine enables the implementation of Flutter’s core APIs, including graphics, text layout, accessibility support, and a plug-in architecture.
• Based on Dart, Flutter’s Framework provides a rich set of libraries that can be divided into layers, including the rendering layer and the widget layer.
• Flutter’s Widgets are its biggest asset. They serve as building blocks that cover almost all aspects of development. Developers can choose from a range of ready-made widgets or customize and create their own.

 

Seven Ways in which Flutter is a Trend Setter in Mobile App Development

1. One code, two platforms: With Flutter, developers can write one codebase for both iOS and Android platforms. Using this feature, Flutter app developers can overcome the roadblocks posed by web development services that require developers to write different codes for different platforms.
2. Hot Reload for faster coding: Flutter offers faster, and more dynamic, development. Using Hot Reload, developers can make changes to the codebase in quick time, and see them reflected immediately (we’re talking in milliseconds) in the application. This feature is also a great help when it comes to bug fixing.
3. Best-fit for MVPs: If you want to build a Minimum Viable Product for your app in a short timeline, Flutter is the perfect option. Also, this removes the requirement to develop two different applications for iOS and Android. It saves developers the time and cost of as they can skip the process of developing and testing prototypes. Also, since Flutter is compatible with Firebase, developers do not need separate backends for building simple MVP, making Flutter-powered mobile applications an instant success.
4. Consistency across platforms and ease of maintenance: Users across operating systems enjoy the same experiences. Also, mobile applications that are developed using the Flutter framework are easy to maintain as they are written using a single codebase. This ease of maintenance ensures that the applications deliver top-quality performance. Any issue with the codebase can be fixed in quick time as soon as it is discovered by the developers. It also saves developers from the effort of writing repetitive code. Enterprises that hire Flutter app developers do not need to invest in any extra machinery.
5. Customized widgets for quick coding: Flutter is all about widgets and widgets are a critical part of application interfaces. One of Flutter’s path-breaking features is how it creates UIs by utilizing these building blocks. Flutter app development provides developers with an exhaustive array of widgets, including navigation, scrolling, and fonts that can be customized irrespective of the screen size. Flutter’s UI experiences are known to be notches ahead of any other cross-platform framework.
6. Your product is your prototype: With Flutter, you don’t have to build prototypes. The product becomes the prototype, as it can be changed at any time, in any phase of the development. Flutter does this by eliminating CSS and turning everything into a widget. This ensures that Flutter app developers can make major design changes with the snap of a finger and cut short the iteration process.
7. Bring efficiency to your coding and app testing processes: Since Flutter app developers only need to write one code for applications across platforms, they work faster and make the development process more efficient. It also allows developers to leverage the code with multiple plugins. To test an application, a basic quality assurance process works well to check the features and functionality of the cross-platform app.

 

The Future is Flutter

Delivering projects on time is the most critical aspect of app development. Speedy development is Flutter’s USP, thus reducing time-to-market and project costs for enterprises. Its third-party libraries and ready-to-use components boost the platform’s efficiency. Flutter has a bright future in the app development market – it’s a safe bet for developers to stick with this trailblazing technology.