Flutter for mobile development and why should you consider it in 2021.
The trend continues.
The mobile market has been continuously growing and 2021 probably won’t be an exception, hence building a mobile application can be crucial for your business. Cross-platform solutions have proven to be successful, having major advantages and overcoming the disadvantages that come along. Some of the benefits include quick development time, low efforts & costs, easier maintenance and having the same consistency in UI/UX on both platforms. Lately, a new solution has been in the spotlight — within a relatively short period of time, using Flutter for mobile development went from experimenting phase to the norm for cross-platform development in various big corporations, as well as innovative startups around the world.
Flutter has entered the chat.
Flutter is a cross-platform framework, launched in 2017 with a promise for fast development, small efforts and costs while maintaining great performance for your apps. Originally developed by Google (who are actively maintaining it), it became an open-source solution, the community having a great impact in developing the framework.
Big players such as Google itself, eBay, Square, or Alibaba have adopted Flutter for mobile development long before the hype. Some notable applications which have integrated it include Google Stadia, Google Ads, Google Pay, Reflectly, eBay Motors, Philips HUE.
Since its launch, Flutter has been rapidly growing in popularity. Taking a glance at the popularity of its main competitor, React Native (launched in 2015), with 92.7k stars on GitHub, the high adoption rate of Flutter becomes more evident, the latter having 111k stars in a shorter period.
But why use Flutter for mobile development?
Other than the general benefits of cross-platform development mentioned before, notable aspects include:
Fast development & great performance: Flutter features an extensive catalog of different components (called widgets), used to build complex and customizable UIs, shifting the developer attention on building the application’s core features. Flutter approaches cross-platform in a different manner, having its own rendering engine and components that are built entirely from scratch, making it a highly performant solution.
Easy to pick up or transition to: Flutter’s programming language is Dart (also developed by Google) which is a language that can be easily learnt or picked up by developers who are already familiar with programming languages such as Java, C# or JavaScript (TypeScript).
Flutter follows the same principles as other libraries/frameworks such as React and the transition can be easily done. As a bonus point: Google has included tutorials for transitioning from popular technologies such as: iOS, Android, React Native.
Developer’s happiness: Building mobile applications in Flutter is not only easy, but fun as well. According to the 2019 and 2020 Stack Overflow developer survey, Flutter is the third most loved framework — being the most loved framework for developing mobile applications — A 2020 survey by Google Flutter team concluded that 94% participants were satisfied with the framework.
Competitors.
Flutter is a great solution for building mobile applications, but it is not the only one. If we are talking about the cross-platform development, React Native also has a strong presence in the market. Also notable mentions are the native solutions for building applications for Android and iOS.
So, the question comes: Should you use React Native or Flutter for mobile development?
Answering these simple questions might help you in your next decision.
- Do you want to build a cross-platform mobile application?
If yes, Flutter or React Native are your go-to options.
If you want to build a performant application for Android and iOS, Flutter might be a better solution for its simplicity and fast pace development.
If you want to build a mobile application and further extend it to a web application, React Native is a better choice since it has the same core technology as some web applications (React)*.
2. Do you want to build a complex, highly-performant mobile app which makes use of extensive features of the phone?
While cross-platform solutions have become more and more stable and performant, native development is still the king in this area.
*It’s worth mentioning that Flutter Web has already been launched, but only time will tell if it will prove successful.
Wrapping it up.
Flutter has been rapidly increasing in popularity in the past few years and proven to be a viable solution for many big players in the industry as well as for many start-ups.
Giving its fast development, ease to adopt and great performance, Flutter is a worthy option in 2021 for your next mobile application.
