Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for cross-platform application development. Since its launch in 2017, it has created a revolution in the world of app development. As the latest announcement in Google IO’21 says, Flutter web is now in stable version and it has extended its support from mobile and web to desktop applications, supporting all popular operating systems — Linux, Mac, Windows and Google Fuchsia.
It has become the hot favourite tool for developers expanding its community to 2 Lakh developers in just a few years. But what makes Flutter so popular? Why it has become the first choice of developers? Will Flutter replace existing native and cross-platform tools like React, Java, Kotlin, Swift etc… Is Flutter the future of app development? In this article we will examine the features of Flutter that make it so popular and why or why not it is future of app development.
From a developer’s standpoint, till 2017 React was the most popular as it provided a smooth learning curve by utilising Javascript and React approach which was easy to learn and implement, whereas Flutter uses Object Oriented Programming using Dart. Which means we need to learn a new language in order to use Flutter. But syntax of Dart is similar to other popular programming languages like Java, Go, C++ etc… With the excellent Flutter documentation and rapidly expanding community support, Flutter is successful in creating a smooth learning curve.
From a user’s view, Flutter boosts performance of an application as it compiles code ahead of time into Native ARM code unlike React Native that requires a JS bridge to parse and execute the code. With its wide variety of customisable UI widgets that provide Native-like look and feel. It uses a high performance rendering engine — Skia which paints the UI from scratch on the screen canvas which makes adding gestures and smooth animations easier.
Flutter is hot favourite for Startups as it is both time and cost efficient. Companies can launch their apps quickly, target multiple platforms at a time and expand their reach. Moreover, they can develop server less applications with easy integration with Firebase (Google’s back end cloud service for mobile and web apps). Now with this framework, they need to hire only Flutter developers and it is sufficient to launch the app on several platforms simultaneously and expand their customer base. Some Top tech giants like Groupon, eBay, Tencent, etc… have already launched their apps in Flutter. Many top companies are also upgrading their applications to Flutter as it provides easy migration from native code.
With all these loads of advantages, Flutter has some threatening flaws. Flutter, like all other cross-platform frameworks lacks the qualities of native applications. For access to native features like camera, speaker, microphones we require to integrate third-party plugins. And for each functionality we need to import several packages which increases the size of the app manifolds.
The revolutionising advantage of Flutter is that it is cross-platform as it can support 6 different platforms from a single code base. But is flutter actually cross-platform? Though we can deploy a single app to 6 different platforms, each platform requires different design patterns. Drawers and Bottom Navigation Bars are not the thing for web and desktop applications. Even though your application can support several platforms, it needs a specific User Interface for each platform. Rather than developing a single app for platforms, it seems convenient to use the same dart logic and develop a separate app for each platform. So if we do this, then the sole purpose of Flutter being cross-platform varnishes!!
On an end note, Flutter is preferable for Startups that are looking for quick and easy solution but not recommendable for complex digital solutions. But the pace at which Flutter is evolving, we can expect it to overcome all the drawbacks in near future and become the leading framework in the world of application development.
This article is contributed by Mansi Kalaria.