Time for “Crap”
As developers, we often hesitate to adopt new technologies in their nascent stages, for production code. The daunting question of stability hangs menacingly in the air every time such a consideration is tempted, until we eventually concede and drop the idea. When a tech giant like Google or Facebook comes up with something new, however, the same question doesn’t seem to scare us that much anymore.
In 2015, Facebook released React Native for developing native apps for both android & iOS with a single code base. It garnered a lot of popularity in a very short period of time. An increasingly sizeable portion of the dev community started quickly moving their apps to React Native. I too jumped on the bandwagon the moment I read about React Native’s OTA (Over The Air) updates feature. It’s safe to say React Native had blown my mind. I played around with React Native for almost 2 years and was really happy with it, until I started noticing the visible performance issues when compared with pure native. This left a slight blemish in an otherwise remarkable experience.
It was at this time, that Google started promoting their in-house alternative for React Native — Flutter.
In mid 2017, Google released a beta version of Flutter. Having been neck deep in React Native for almost 2 years, I was reluctant to try Flutter, especially considering the added effort of learning a new language — Dart. My inertia notwithstanding, the tech geek inside me shoved me towards giving it a fair shot. I grumbled, opened Flutter’s official docs, and started grudgingly working on an application that I fondly called, Crap.
Look, I’m not saying Flutter hasn’t got the chops, but after being so familiar with RN, I longed for my beloved OTA updates. Safe to say, I wasn’t really rooting for Flutter when I started out with, well, “Crap”.
As I started getting my hands dirty, however, I realized that it was considerably easier to do a lot of things in Flutter, which would have taken much longer in React Native. Flutter has amazing developer tools, beautiful widgets, and really smooth animations. In a few weeks time, Flutter had me impressed. I was buzzing with intrigue by the time I was done with “Crap”. It quite frankly did not look like a weekend project, and ended up with a surprising amount of features.
Feel free to check out Crap, my first Flutter app, on the Play Store — https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.amarjain.crap
With one app already on the Play Store, I’m only excited about building more with Flutter, pushing the boundaries of what it can do, and discover beautiful things in the process. This is just the beginning of my journey with Flutter, and I eagerly look forward to seeing what the dev community builds with it!
Thank you Hriddhi Dey for your help!
