Why is Flutter a better choice than its native competitors?
It often happens that a new software engineer sets out to explore the most famous and thrilling tech ground — App Development. As easy as it may sound, choosing the right spec sheet and ideology behind building your app is downright difficult. From your initial idea, selecting your target audience to finalising the tech stack required to build it; it all boils down to the requirement and availability of resources.
Until May 2017, app development had always been dependent on the ‘Native’ development kits released by respective companies — namely Apple for iOS and Google for Android, in addition to various Web development frameworks.
What are Native Tools?
Native application building refers to developing an app-specific to either iOS, Android, Windows, or Web, etc. making full use of the device’s features, such as gyroscope, accelerometer, camera, microphone to name a few. Some of the commonly used frameworks and programming languages are:-
iOS: Swift, Objective-C, and Xcode
Android: Kotlin, Java, and Android Studio
Web: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and now with the support of various other languages and frameworks like Cordova, etc.
What is Flutter?
As described by Google, Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.
Flutter is an open-source, cross-platform framework that not only has optimised and great libraries but is also supported and contributed by a team of Google Developers and a vast community. For app developers, it means, a vast array of features and unending support from people who are always looking out for improving the framework.
What would you get by using Flutter?
1. Release from the same code base
If you have ever worked on native apps before, you would be well versed with the struggles of maintaining different code bases for different environments i.e. separate source for iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, and Web, hence, complicating and making everything go haywire.
The best feature that flutter comes along with is its cross-platform functionality i.e. using the same code base to compile the code into different native apps. You can have the same business logic, same dependencies, and different engineers contributing to the same code, compiled into various platform apps.
2. Great performance
Flutter uses Dart by Google, Dart is a client-optimized language for fast apps on any platform, which is solely based on making responsive and optimised UI. Dart offers complete and mature async-await along with isolate-based concurrency. With the familiarity of syntaxes from different languages, Dart is also easier to learn.
It directly compiles into native code. Since it comes with its very own widget library, dart doesn’t need to access OEM widgets, which means, less mediated communication between app and platform. With the recent addition of null-safety, Dart is inevitably a strong language — resulting in faster startup time and fewer performance issues.
3. Faster and simple development
One of the most applauded features of flutter is hot reload, which allows you to directly load and view any new changes to the app without re-building it entirely: on emulators, simulators, and hardware. In a few seconds, the code will reload while the app is running, without having to restart it. This isn’t great just for adding features or improvising, but also for bug fixing.
4. Compatibility
As mentioned earlier, Dart has its own widgets and doesn’t have to interact with OEM widgets, there will be no compatibility issues in terms of widgets with different OS versions.
5. Open source
Both Flutter and Dart are open-source, hence there is a huge community and extensive documents out there to help you on your way.
6. Solid Architecture
Flutter uses Dart which has an enormous component library built-in, resulting in a bigger size but often does not require a bridge to communicate with native modules. Dart has various frameworks — covering almost every required tech stack to develop an app. In addition to it, Flutter uses Skia C++ engine, which has all protocols, channels, and compositions defined. Hence, giving you a full-fledged environment without worrying about a single add-on.
7. Build and release
Flutter has a very strong command line; it allows us to create a binary or an executable of the app. Following the docs, we can also release it for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, and Web bundle respectively. Flutter has also officially added docs for continuous delivery with ‘fastlane’.
Conclusion
Since its inception in May 2017, Flutter has rooted itself in the tech world and will continue to grow. It had already declared itself to be a much-needed tool in 2020, with more and more advancement on its way — Flutter is bound to become ‘one of the best tools, if not ‘the best, that you would want in your arsenal.
Also, do not forget that Google has Fuchsia, an open-source OS coming up, a multipurpose OS which can be used for mobile, PC, TV and embedded systems. Flutter was developed keeping Fuchsia in mind. Hence, is a tool that can no longer be ignored.
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