How is Flutter Different from Native, Web-view, and Other Cross-platform Frameworks

An architectural comparison between flutter and other cross-platform solutions

Originally published at https://wajahatkarim.com on November 21, 2019.

Flutter is an application development framework from Google for creating cross-platform mobile applications (in iOS and Android). As mentioned on the official website, it aims to make the development as easy, quick, and productive as possible. Features such as Hot Reload, a vast widget catalog, very good performance, and a solid community contribute to meeting that objective and make Flutter a pretty good mobile development framework.

This post is an excerpt from the book Google Flutter Mobile Development Quick Start Guide by Packt Publishing written by Prajyot Mainkar, and Salvatore Giordano. This is a fast-paced guide to get you started with cross-platform mobile application development with Google Flutter.

When speaking of mobile application development, there are many different approaches that we can find, but, in the end, everything comes down to either a native or a cross-platform approach. Let’s see how different approaches look and work when compared to Flutter. We will first take a look at the native platforms, and then, before looking at the cross-platform approach, we will take a look at the WebView system, and finally we will see where Flutter fits into this mix.