If you are stumbling across this article, you are probably wondering; Why should I build my next project using Flutter, and What does my business benefit from using it?
This article’s target audience isn’t limited to developers or business owners but stretches to CTOs, TechLeads, all the way to any role involved in making successful technology decisions for a business.
My goal here is to provide an understanding of Flutter and why it’s the most popular cross-platform system out there. Compared to other cross-platform applications available, you’ll hear about Flutter’s advantages and the role of these advantages in both growth and business processes. Thus, this piece aims to offer a glimpse into why Flutter can be a successful solution to some of a company’s reoccurring problems.
Flutter? What is that?
Over my years in software development, I have experienced the recurring challenge of deciding which tool to use for mobile cross-platform development in various projects. All the projects and products were different, but nearly all of them had one goal in common: to operate on as many platforms as possible. In most cases, my clients and employers went the native route, which included building out platform-specific teams for app-specific implementation.
To solve this need, Google released Flutter in 2017. Flutter is a software development kit that enables developers to build cross-platform applications through a single codebase. It integrates the simplicity of development with native performance while retaining platform-wide visual stability. Flutter is a bit different from its rivals in a few specific ways. Let’s take a closer look at what makes the Flutter app’s creation better than other frameworks.
One Codebase for UI and Business Logic
Flutter applications look and perform very close to native apps, both on iOS and Android. To render the UI, Flutter does not require any platform-specific UI components. A canvas to draw on is the only thing Flutter needs to view the program UI. The Flutter rendering method lets the structure stand out from the crowd, removing any questions about the UI’s accuracy on multiple platforms.
Other cross-platform architecture offers a means for the target systems to share codebases. This kind of approach to sharing code makes it easy to create an interface that looks native on any device. However, relying on platform-specific rendering components triggers a platform to widget property mapping layer and synchronize data from the system widget. That’s what involves mapping each animation into a widget call unique to the platform.
In summary, Flutter saves the developer’s time while not impacting the end product’s performance.
Flutter app and Native App Performance are comparable.
Application efficiency is essential for successful UX. Although the exact numbers are difficult to tell, it is fair to assume that the Flutter framework’s output in most instances would be indistinguishable from the native app. Flutter applications fare better in complicated UI animation scenarios compared to their cross-platform counterparts. Flutter applications are fully compiled, eliminating the common performance issues that arise in interpreted solutions.
Custom Complex UI Animation Available
The freedom to configure everything you see on the interface, regardless of how technical it might be, is one of Flutter’s most significant benefits. While it is generally possible to do a custom UI on the native platforms, the amount of effort required depends on the request’s size. However, without contributing to the workload, Flutter makes the operation more fluid and versatile. Transitions of shared elements, manipulations of shape/color/shadow, cutting, and transformations — Flutter helps you do all of these seamlessly. Here are some more explanations of how it works.
Flutter's Rendering Engine
Flutter helps you to do many features that aren’t possible on other devices for your software. It needs the structure to be sturdy. In reality, without a high-performance cross-platform rendering engine, several of the points mentioned above would not be feasible. To make itself on a platform-provided canvas, Flutter uses Skia. A developer can deploy the Flutter-built UI on nearly any platform because of the engine. To put it differently, you no longer have to change the UI to move it to a platform, which significantly simplifies development.
Platform-Specific Logic Implementation
In addition to the UI, many real-life mobile apps rely on advanced OS-level functionality, such as GPS coordinates, Bluetooth connectivity, sensor data collection, authorization management, credential service, etc. Many of these are accessible via a ready-to-use plugin sponsored by Google while creating a Flutter program. There will be instances of the application depending on a feature at the OS level that is not yet usable as a plugin. Flutter offers an easy to use means of creating connectivity across platform channels between platform-native code and Dart. This way, with only a little extra work on the native side, you can incorporate everything a native app can do.
Potential to Go Beyond Mobile
With Flutter, you will go way beyond the smartphone production of Flutter applications. Today, Flutter for Network and Flutter Desktop Embeddings are also here. For example, Google introduced a technical demo of Flutter Web at this year’s I/O conference, making it easy to run pure Flutter software in a browser without changing the source code. This significant occurrence marks Flutter’s transition from a cross-platform web application system to a full-blown cross-platform development tool.
While this is not production-ready, the system’s mobile component, and an accomplished Flutter developer, can now run a pure Flutter app on any big platform, including Android, iOS, Web browser, Windows, macOS Linux, and even embedded computers. The app can work appropriately with no modifications to the Dart code.
Is Flutter Good For Your Business?
For a business, certain items reflect its worth dramatically. These are a platform’s reliability, results, a vast pool of talent, and the assurance of significant growth and enhancement of tech/products. In all the ways mentioned, the explanation is that problems and weaknesses in platforms or technologies cause risks, along with direct and indirect financial losses for your business.
With this in mind, Flutter reduces the following risks for your business:
- Rapid development times
- A growing pool of engineers with many among the Android developers’ community
- Growing global support and adoption: companies using Flutter are ever-growing, thus joining the likes of The New York Times, Tencent, Alibaba Group, etc., a testament to Flutter’s uncompromised quality.
These things make Flutter a market option to avoid hurdles to finding experts, adapting to emerging technology, and incorporating the instrument into the system. Flutter offers negligible risks to an organization relative to the alternative cross-platform approaches available and deserving of being the number one option for your company.
So Why Flutter?
In summary, the most outstanding advantages of the framework:
- app UI and logic don’t vary depending on the platform
- rapid development
- reduction in time to market
- comparable to native app performance
- virtually limitless UI customization potential
- Flutter native rendering engine leading to no dependence on platform-specific UI components
- future expansion to mobile, web, and desktop apps
- decreases risks and losses for your business
Flutter is the best option for developing and delivering a well-performing cross-platform mobile application. I can tell that it’s just a matter of time until Flutter officially becomes the ultimate cross-platform UI framework