Flutter is coming
3 reasons why 2020 will be Flutter’s year (January 2020 update)
My goal here is not to enumerate every benefits of Flutter. Many other posts do that very well and as a developer I don’t like to reinvent the wheel. Instead, I will try to convince you that Flutter will take off in 2020.
If just like me, you have been following Flutter from the first alpha versions, you’ll say : “Flutter has already been here for a long time dude!”
That’s true! The hype around Flutter is strong in mobile developper’s world since it came out: Flutter was released in version 1.0 in 2018. That’s quite young and I noticed that a lot of developers and companies had not heard about it yet. Unlike React native which slowly became the #1 cross platform solution. I’ll get back to it...
If you haven’t been caught by this Flutter hype yet, and if you don’t even know what is it, I’ll let you read this excellent post which will enlighten you to the smallest details.
In a few words (Google’s words) : Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.
Yes, another cross platform solution. A lot of them already exist (or have existed) but to be honest, none has ever really competed with native mobile (ie swift & kotlin) especially in terms of user experience. And there are a lot more arguments but let’s not dive into this stormy debate.
I said none, but React Native is nowadays pretty mature and is appreciated by developers entailed by the success of React (Javascript front web library, check top 10 Github repos below). And also by a lot of companies who gave it a try (and came back from it like Airbnb cf this post).
Others companies started to wonder if this could be the right moment to get rid of their old native applications… And to start over from scratch with React Native in order drop down maintenance costs with only one code base and one developer profile to hire…
Wait here! These are 3 reasons why these companies should go for Flutter in 2020:
Stability
Flutter version 1.0 was released in 2018, and we reached version 1.9.1 by the end of 2019). During that year, development team put the accent on bug fixing, performances, ease of adoption for developers and the ecosystem (check their roadmap for more info). All that in order to convince more people, release after release, and according to the next point it is working pretty well…
Release 1.9.1 is Flutter’s biggest update yet (January 2020 update : 1.12.13 is now the biggest one !) with more than 1,500 PRs from more than 100 contributors within the two months since their last stable release. Not so bad don’t you think?
Popularity
Flutter reached top 10 software repository on Github late 2019 and . A quick look at this top will make you quickly realize that the 9 others are not beginners!
At Idean France I can feel this popularity too, Flutter is the most wanted and awaited skills by our mobile and web developers.
And don’t forget, nowadays they are the decision-makers! ;)
Web in sight
1.9 Flutter gives early support for running web applications, but it is still tech preview. It is not ready for production yet (missing features and known performance issue) but looks promising. (January 2020 update : web support for Flutter is now in beta with 1.12 release)
You should take a look at this site built with Flutter and it will give you an insight of a real app done with it. Also take a look at the related post detailing the code.
We’re getting closer to the “write once deploy everywhere”…
I know you’re thinking that I’m just blinded by the exciting newcomer…
Ok! So I’ll give you these 2 “cons”:
- DART language used by Flutter is a new language to master, but developers are not lost with it and it has a fast learning curve. This post explains why Google has chosen DART, and this video just below explains it in 1'36. And because of hot reload, it is worth the cost (yeah for mobile developer that’s huge). So yeah that’s not really a disadvantage to me! ;)
- Another cons, but rather a risk inherent to any framework/library supported by a big company, is that Google is dropping support of Flutter, like they did for some other experimentations in the past, but it seems they are betting big on it…
So are you ready to face winter with Flutter ? Yes ? Great because both are coming !
I shared my personal belief about Flutter, but I do not put aside other cross-platform solutions like React Native, neither native development of course. We are still using and recommending those in many cases. I am enthusiastic but I keep my feet on the ground.
At Idean we have great designers who will exploit the freedom that Flutter brings in terms of UI / UX, and excellent developers who will give life to this design.
Contact us if you need help to design, conceive and deliver your mobile app or rebuild it from scratch with Flutter!
And if you want to develop with Flutter (or any other front end development solution) then join us!
Links
If you want to know more about the tech behind Flutter, check out this post about Flutter from Florent, one of our lead developer.
