Introduction
Mobile apps have completely transformed the way how businesses used to work. These days, if a business wants to spread its root in the online business world, mobile app development is the first thing they need to work upon. But for some businesses, especially for start-ups and small-scale businesses, having an app on multiple platforms was not a budget-friendly option, as creating native apps for each platform would cost them a lot. But with the introduction of cross-platform app development, this problem was easily solved. Cross-platform app development is not only a budget-friendly option, but it also facilitates the agile app development process and let you introduce your app early in the market.
Now as we all know, there are too many technologies available in the market but to make your app a success, you need to choose the right technology, and the same goes for cross-platform app development. Flutter and React Native are the two most popular technologies available for cross-platform app development and today we are going to talk about one of these.
Flutter is a cross-platform mobile app development framework that is known to create powerful apps for both small-scale and large-scale enterprises. With all the new advantages this technology offers, Flutter app development service providers have influenced the market a lot. In this article, we are going to talk in detail about this technology and you will understand why Flutter can be a better option for your next project.
How Flutter Was Originated?
When the market was confused between hybrid and native apps, in 2015 Flutter appeared out of the blue. The Hybrid app development process was fast but it still had a lot of issues as compared to that of native app development. To all of these questions, the answer was Flutter. It is a dart-based platform which gives access to platform-specific SDKs for both android and iOS. This feature gives a native feel to the whole process and the final product.
The technical giant Google is also using it as it is a new platform for its operating system known as Fuchsia. This means that Google will soon introduce its own software for all platforms and will not support android anymore.
The Advantages of Flutter App Development
1. Support and Community
Since Flutter was introduced, it has rapidly shown massive growth. Its demand is increasing exponentially in the market and all the businesses want to hire Flutter app developers for their app development and maintenance. The latest release of Flutter 1.17 has solved nearly 6340 issues by collaborating with Nevercode. To date, it has around 231 contributors who are working together to resolve all the issues. In the last six months, three major issues were resolved:
- App size was reduced
- The performance of iOS has improved.
- Operative memory consumption was also reduced.
With the help of all the collaborations and pull-up requests, Flutter is improving a lot with each passing day.
2. Platform-Specific Logic Implementation
Since hybrid apps were introduced, the trend of platform-specific apps was missed by most developers, and Flutter bought it back. Due to this, the demand for flutter app developers has increased a lot. Most of the real-life mobile applications like GPS, Bluetooth communication, gesture recognition, permission handling, etc. completely rely on advanced OS-level features. Flutter allows developing such applications with the help of inbuilt plugins, which saved a lot of time and human effort.
It may take some time to develop such features for native apps but Flutter made it easy and effortless.
3. Business Perspective
In this fast-paced world, every business wants to develop a top-notch app for their business without investing a lot of time. This has made every Flutter app development company very popular. As compared to hybrid apps, Flutter is better and more secure for your business. It can easily be integrated and most giants like Alibaba and Google Ads are using Flutter without facing any major issues. It gives a lot of added benefits that meet all the needs and demands of your business and on time. Some of them have been listed below:
- Code development is faster
- Time-to-market speed is improved
- Secure and reduces the risk of cyber attacks
- UI customization potential
- Separate rendering engine
4. Reduced Code Development Time
To adjust small visual aspects, now you don’t have to go to the Android studio to preview the layout. With the introduction of the ‘hot reload,’ you can see all the applied changes instantly, which makes the development and maintenance process a lot faster and cost-effective. Now you don’t have to hire app developers for every small update and issue. It saves a lot of effort and time for your developers as Flutter has a lot of inbuilt ready-to-use widgets which can be customized very easily.
Read Also: Flutter Vs React Native: Which One to Choose
5. Same UI Logic in All Platforms
The same UI and business logic in all platforms have made cross-platform mobile app development a lot easier and efficient. Flutter allows the sharing of both the UI code and UI itself, which no other platform allows. It does not need any platform-specific UI components to render its UI.
In short, sharing the UI and business logic is only possible with Flutter. It saves a lot of time and efforts of developers, without compromising the quality of the end product.
6. Time-To-Market Speed
Most businesses want to have mobile app development services that can meet their deadlines and needs with the time constraints of the market. It can be due to anything – urgent deadlines, rivalry, or a sudden launch. It works quicker than all the other app developments. It takes almost half the time as you do not have to write every platform-specific code. Inbuilt UI features can be used and the code that takes days to implement can be customized within a few hours.
7. Similarities to Native Apps
It is no secret that because of the trend of hybrid apps we all were somewhere missing native apps. In most cases, Flutter apps are completely identical to native apps which increased the demand for a Flutter app development company, that too with less time and effort. As a Flutter application is built directly on machine code, this will eliminate any bugs and glitches.
8. Customizable and Complex UI
With the added benefit of cross-platform development, Flutter also allows customizing any kind of animated UI without compromising its complexity and quality. This reduces the workload of developers and makes the process flexible.
9. Own Rendering Engine
Flutter has its own rendering engine which is not available on any other platform. With the help of its rendering engine, UI built-in Flutter can be launched on any platform anywhere, anytime virtually.
10. Ability to Go Beyond Mobile
Along with all the mobile development frameworks, Flutter also has the potential to go beyond mobile phones. In simple words, you can use Flutter for web and desktop embeddings as well. The latest Flutter Web allows you to run pure Flutter applications on the browser without modifying the source code.
11. Mobile App Performance
Flutter is revolutionary for both android app development services and iOS app development services. It has rapidly improved the performance of apps on all the available platforms. Its standard is 60 FPS (Frames Per Second) which runs smoothly as compared to all other native platforms as well. It also uses Javascript Bridge in order to initialize the screen. Inbuilt Dart analysis also helps developers to analyze their code before implementing it, this will save a lot of time and will not compromise the quality of the code.
12. Flexibility and Adaptive Nature
Most of the iOS and android app development solutions are using Flutter with full dedication and a lot of excitement. It has a long list of widgets that can be customized easily regardless of how complex they are. This will save a lot of time for developers and will meet all the time-to-market demands.
It also supports six operating systems. You just have to make one base code and with a few changes in the syntax, and you can easily launch the app on any of the following systems:
- Android
- iOS
- macOS
- Windows
- Linux
- Web
As mentioned above, along with all of this it also supports any native language.
13. Lifecycle Management
If you are using any other platforms than Flutter then you will have to make changes in the app after certain intervals of time, and you also might have to change the complete source code to make the updates. With the introduction of Flutter, the lifecycle of the management of apps has increased a lot. It has improved with time. In order to make it better, you can also use some additional lifecycle management widgets such as OrientationBuilder.
Flutter Is Everywhere
Due to its native nature and cross-platform app development, Flutter app development is everywhere so hire app developers who have expertise in Flutter. It is more stable and efficient than other technologies that were already available in the market. It has a lot of benefits like its support and community is increasing with each passing day, and it has a lot of ready-to-use solutions that save the time and effort of developers.
It offers a great combination of both native and cross-platform apps and that too in very less time.
Companies That Are Currently Using Flutter
Flutter is the most popular and quite easy to use cross-platform app development technology, and many big companies are using this framework, either completely or partially, for their app development projects. The image below name some of the most famous giants built using Flutter:
Conclusion
Flutter is improving with each passing day but to date, it has proved to be the best app development platform with all of its perks. Now businesses do not have to hire app developers for each and every little change. Any UI can be customized easily using Flutter with all of its available ready-to-use widgets. It is the quickest and the most effortless way to launch cross-platform apps within a restricted amount of time.
