Is Flutter the Right Choice to Build a Mobile App?

The popularity of Flutter as a game-changing framework to build cross-platform apps has reached far and wide. Even though of recent origin (released in 2017) Flutter has been utilized by famous companies like Alibaba, Google Ads, Tencent, Hamilton Music, and Reflectly. Its growing popularity shows that Flutter is not a ‘flash in the pan’ as many had thought about it earlier. Instead, it has become arguably one of the popular frameworks to build hybrid applications for mobiles and other platforms.

So, why so much excitement surrounding Flutter, and as a business owner, do you want to engage an agency offering mobile app development services to build Flutter-based apps to meet your business goals? Find the answers in the blog.

The origin of Flutter

It is a framework developed by Google, which first appeared as Sky in 2015. Written in DART, an Object-Oriented programming language built on C and C++, it offers app developers access to SDKs that are specific to Android and iOS thereby giving the final app a native-like feel. Since DART compiles to a binary code, the speed of operations is as good as Swift, Objective C, Java or Kotlin. As a successor to Java and Kotlin, Flutter is pegged as the new framework for Google’s next-gen operating system, Fuchsia. Flutter was released in 2018 wherein developers got to work on its stable version, and the experience seems to have caught on thereafter.

Why should you choose Flutter for your business?

There are plenty of reasons to choose Flutter over other frameworks as listed below:

# Community Support: In a short period of its release, Flutter has hit around 93,000 stars on GitHub – a popular collaborative platform for developers, which is testimony to its popularity among the developer community. With subsequent version releases, Flutter has seen vast improvements thanks to its collaboration with Nevercode, a continuous development and integration tool that allows developers to identify and resolve issues.

# Use of Widgets: Flutter allows developers to use widgets and see the result of their code instantly instead of developing UI elements for every screen and resolution. This becomes convenient as the developer just needs to develop a UI element once and see it being adapted automatically to other screens. Besides, it is time-saving for the QA specialists as they need not check the app design across device platforms. Also, since the components of Flutter are rendered natively, the resultant app offers a native app-like feel with better performance.

# Hot Reload: This particular feature helps the developer to add features and fix glitches easily and quickly. Hot reload allows developers to view changes applied to the code immediately without restarting the app. Here, for every change made to the code, the app does not reload entirely except for the changes the developer is working on. This way, the development and maintenance time of the app can be reduced by as much as 30%, making Flutter all the more cost-effective for businesses.

# Native App Similarity: Given the rising trend of developing hybrid or cross-platform apps due to their cost-effectiveness and faster speed of development, the focus towards building native apps was shifting away. However, since Flutter-based apps give a native-like feel their demand has risen sharply. Moreover, it is easy to work with any native functionality in Flutter thanks to its libraries, which allow connection with specific device components such as cameras, GPS chips, and microphones. Even a library to access the AR capabilities of a device has been added. So, using these libraries the basic tasks related to a project can be accomplished.

# Performance: Flutter is highly performance-oriented when compared to native languages and has an edge over cross-platform technologies as well. Moreover, special tools like Flutter Inspector and Dart Analysis allow developers to analyze the code and keep its performance level to the optimum. Flutter does not need any intermediate interpretation as it is directly built into the machine code. So, any application built on this framework gets fully compiled quickly. It also helps in eliminating bugs and glitches without any hassles.

# Rendering Engine: The powerful features of Flutter are made possible due to its high-performance rendering engine called Skia. The engine helps any UI built on Flutter to be launched on any platform. And since the UI does not need to be adjusted to be transferred to a platform, the development process becomes simplified. Also, due to its rendering engine, Flutter-based apps are not affected by any system customization or update of the operating system. In fact, the app interface would still look the same even after any Android or iOS update. The version compatibility of Flutter is something that allows developers to work with the previous API, thereby strengthening the stability of the app.

# DartPub: Developers working on Flutter use the package manager DartPub for it contains many reusable libraries. DartPub allows developers to not only see the popularity of a plug-in but also whether it has been regularly updated or not. This information becomes valuable while developing custom features, for the developer can minutely review the performance of the features under development.

…Some More Reasons to Convince You!

Any business would look for certain attributes in a framework such as stability, speed of development, simplicity, performance, and the availability of resources. The absence of any of these attributes can create risks and cause financial loss for the business. However, Flutter can be the right choice for businesses for the following reasons:

• There is a huge developer community behind Flutter. Therefore, businesses can easily find experts who are adept at working with Flutter.
• It allows for faster code development and ensures a fast time-to-market (TTM).
• A hybrid app, as opposed to a native app, allows you to get an access to a wider audience
• Great potential to customize UI

Quick Statistics

Before closing today’s discussion, let’s quickly glance over some statistics. This will give you a real-time idea of all the advantages of Flutter we explored so far. Since the release of version 1.12, the development community has been able to achieve the following:

• Significantly minimize the memory consumption during operations, sometimes by even 70%
• Reduce the app size
• Enhance the performance of iOS apps by 50%

Conclusion

The popularity of cross-platform apps due to their faster speed of development, cost-effectiveness, and compatibility with various device and OS platforms means businesses are adopting them to remain competitive. This is where the Flutter framework wins the race by a margin as it offers native-like performance at the cost of a hybrid app. If you want to develop a robust, feature-rich, and secure hybrid app offering great UI/UX, it’s time to hire Flutter developers without any delay!