Flutter: Google’s Portable UI Toolkit For Crafting Beautiful Applications

Knowingly or unknowingly we all would have probably already used the apps made with Flutter. The short history of Flutter has been evident in your everyday life, whether you bought something on Alibaba, ran an ad campaign on Google Ads, used Google Pay, or printed a digital coupon.
According to the number of stars on GitHub (119k compared to React Native’s 95k),Flutter gained unprecedented popularity not long after its alpha launch in May 2017 and its official release in December 2018. Moreover, the demand for the product continues to grow, confirming its universal appeal.
Flutter’s second generation was released in March 2021 with enhanced mobility capabilities, which improved developer and user experience with upgrades and enhancements. Therefore, I decided to examine Flutter inside out to find out the advantages and disadvantages it offers in regards to your next app, to help you decide whether it’s a useful tool for you.

WHAT IS FLUTTER ?

Since its debut, Flutter has gained significant traction. Basically, it’s a software
development kit (SDK) that enables development for multiple platforms (Android, iOS, as well as Windows Phone). Therefore, one codebase will power multiple apps. That’s awesome, isn’t it?
A startup, Flutter was later acquired by Google. The project is now an open-source project that uses Dart (a programming language designed exclusively for Flutter) to develop apps. Flutter’s components enable apps to have a more native-like feel and, as a result, a better user experience as well as easier and faster code writing.

WHY SHOULD YOU USE FLUTTER?

1. The power of writing once, deploying anywhere: In just a single codebase, Flutter allows you to create your iOS, Android, or web app. Flutter makes the process of building cross-platform apps incredibly easy, and the resulting applications look excellent. Creating prototypes has never been easier thanks to Flutter’s custom widgets. Flutter allows Google to create what it calls Ambient Computing — apps that can run anywhere, regardless of device limitations, completely independent of where you are.
2. Hot Reload feature: This feature is definitely a great asset for any developer, saving hours of time and helping them to make better products, providing developers with peace of mind. As a result of hot reload, developers can see real-time changes taken effect while they make changes to code. You can make changes and try out new stuff easier so that
   when you’re tweaking the app or collaborating with a designer, it’s easier.
   If you made changes in an application, you had to restart it to see the changes? Remember that time? Well, with flutter, to see the changes you made, you do not have to restart the application.
3. Flutter App Builder: After the acquisition of Flutter, Google added this functionality. The App Builder makes Flutter even more powerful. In other words, it’s a tool that allows you to create an app like how you would construct a lego house. Developing your own app is a snap with this tool, as you can mix and match features to build a prototype, MVP, or test it out on real users very quickly. You then code the UI with Dart (which you may need to learn first).
4. Easy App maintenance: With Flutter, you can roll out updates more smoothly, since the codebase remains the same across platforms. By simultaneously updating your iOS and Android apps, you can drastically reduce the changes to backend infrastructure and the implementation
   and synchronization problems that arise when different teams work on different platforms. Thus, having published your app, you can now focus all your efforts on expanding your user base and improving your core product. Flutter application development makes it easy to handle app maintenance tasks like bug fixing. Due to this, startups can save money by doing away with development teams and instead handling app maintenance internally. Regardless of the cost of hiring developers in-
   house, with Flutter, you would need only one developer instead of being required to have them work for iOS and Android separately.

OKAY! BUT HERE’S A SECOND THOUGHT…

1. Still a young technology: Despite its popularity, Flutter has not been around long enough to have a large resource base. Because of this, your development team will have to start from scratch at a lot of points.
2. First Dart, then Flutter: Flutter’s official language is Dart, so you will need to learn it if you plan on using it.
3. Platform Specific Look: Even though Flutter enables you to run high-performance apps across iOS and Android with just one codebase, there is a little bit of a concern for purists about getting that platform-specific look and feel. Depending on whether your app must strictly obey Material Design principles on Android devices or Apple Design System on iOS, you may need to prepare two separate applications.
4. Heavy Apps: It is not uncommon for Flutter apps to be long and heavy.

CONCLUSION

Despite Flutter app development having some legitimate cons, the pros usually outweigh these cons. Knowing about them is nevertheless helpful, however. Consider sticking with native development if you are particular about the look and feel of your app and think you may end up integrating native features into Dart.
But Flutter offers undeniable advantages, such as faster and cheaper development. You can use these advantages to use your funding more carefully and get your product to market more quickly. Your MVP idea will be validated faster with faster development, and you will be able to begin testing early on.
In short, the best scenarios where Flutter can be a savior are:

In the event that you need your app quickly or you are developing an MVP

When You Need A Complex User Interface

When Your App Needs Excellent Performance

When Time Is Really Running Out and you are under time pressure