Why Native Developers Should Pay Close Attention to Flutter?
I started native iOS development in 2010. There was no automatic reference counting (ARC) and you have to use Objective-C as your primary language. I created my first app (ABC POP) in 7 days and after that I was hooked. All I wanted to do is native iOS development.
Unfortunately, most of the companies in Houston were not interested in native iOS apps. These companies were in the business of oil/gas, energy, medicine, finance etc. I would sit in meetings where they make the case for cross platform frameworks like PhoneGap, Ionic, Xamarin etc. This left me frustrated as I wanted to create native iOS apps.
It was only after I saw things from their point of view that I realize that these companies are NOT in the business of making apps. They are simply using mobile as a medium to channel information to their internal employees. They wanted a bigger bang for their buck and did not wanted to spend resources on creating and maintaining two separate codebases and managing two different set of teams.
In 2017 Google released Flutter framework, which allowed to build cross platform applications using a single codebase. Flutter is inspired from React Native framework and reflects the same declarative style of programming. One thing that separates Flutter from other cross platform frameworks is that it paints directly to canvas. This means Flutter does not pay any toll while entering and leaving the native world. This makes Flutter apps behave just like native apps.
For past couple of months I have been writing small Flutter apps and I have been extremely impressed with the results.
Here are two small apps I have written in Flutter.
Place Finder App
Place Finder app integrates with location services, Google maps and Google places API to allow user to search for the nearest point of interests.
News App
News App integrates with the NewsAPI.org service and displays the latest news around the world. I have also added the functionality of searching for news based on specific keywords.
Hacker News
Hacker News app integrates with the Hacker News public API. It fetches top 10 latest stories. The app also allows user to view comments associated with the story.
Both of these apps were written in matter of few hours. The exciting part is that the apps works on both (iOS and Android) platforms. I am sure it won’t take much effort to make them available on the web using Flutter for web, introduced at Google I/O 2019.
Programming in Flutter feels like playing with LEGO. Everything is a widget! You simply put the widgets together to create your app. There are tons of widgets available, which can satisfy most of your requirements. Most of these widgets are contributed by the amazing members of the Flutter community.
Flutter is relatively a new framework and does have limitations. But one thing is for sure that Flutter has one of the most vibrant and passionate communities I have ever seen. If you are a native developer, keeping a close eye on Flutter framework would be a wise investment.
