What is Flutter?
What is Flutter?
Paint your app to life in milliseconds with Stateful Hot Reload. Use a rich set of fully-customizable widgets to build native interfaces in minutes.
Quickly ship features with a focus on native end-user experiences. Layered architecture allows for full customization, which results in incredibly fast rendering and expressive and flexible designs.
Flutter’s widgets incorporate all critical platform differences such as scrolling, navigation, icons and fonts, and your Flutter code is compiled to native ARM machine code using Dart’s native compilers.
Pros of Native App Development
High Performance
Native built apps offer extremely high performance in terms of speed, responsiveness and operational efficiency. This is possible as these platform specific apps are programmed using core programming languages and APIs. Moreover, they are able to leverage the device’s processing speed to its full potential, hence ensuring lower load time.
Broad Functionality
As highlighted earlier, the biggest advantage of native over cross platform is the former’s ability to access all the features of the platform it is made for. This ultimately results in faster execution & better user experience. Additionally, native apps can function without internet connectivity making it the best solution for complex mobile applications.
Ultimate UI/UX
To create apps with robust and intuitive user experience and consistent look and feel, native technology is your best bet. Developed using native software development kits (SDKs) and destined for a particular operating system, native mobile apps deliver a more natural flow to its users.
Moreover, sticking to specific guidelines allows familiar actions & gestures for users and maintaining aspect ratio ensures better visuals and better control over the user interface.
Higher Security and Reliability
Native apps are better poised to provide protection against security violations over cross-platform apps. How? Native apps are programmed using the core language of the platform, which makes them more secure and reliable.
Also, features such as proactive security upgrades, multi-factor authentication and remote management controls ensure the strictest data security and privacy.
Store’s Support
It is easier to launch native apps in the app store as they comply with iOS and Android guidelines by default. Native is considered to be preferred both by Google & Apple as they mostly feature native apps on their store. And ofcourse, getting featured on an app store reinforces your brand and gives your downloads a quantum jump.
Cons of Native App Development
High Cost
The biggest drawback of Native development is its cost. There are two primary reasons for this high cost – first, native app development is complex due to which professional development and support consumes a lion’s share of the project budget. Note that, native mobile developers are more expensive compared to cross-platform ones. Second, in order to cater to two different sets of audiences i.e., Android and iOS, it requires two distinct native apps, leading to setting up two development teams, and ultimately soaring the total cost.
Difficulties with Updates and Maintenance
Maintaining separate builds for separate platforms that require regular maintenance & support is challenging. You may face difficulty in collaborating several teams or in rolling out feature updates or new features.
Slow Development Speed
The speed of development is yet another downside of mobile native vs. cross-platform app. It consumes significantly more time to develop a native app than its cross-platform counterpart does. There’s also no chance to repurpose the native code of one operating system for another, resulting in slower development.
What is Cross-platform app development?
Cross-platform app development provides you the flexibility of building mobile applications using a universal language, making this single app compatible with more than one mobile platforms. The key advantage of cross-platform is code reusability, thereby simplifying the entire development process.
Flutter is a complete software development kit (SDK) that allows developers to create mobile, web, and desktop apps from a single codebase. Unlike other popular solutions, such as React Native or Xamarin, Flutter is not just a library or framework but a complete SDK that provides a comprehensive set of tools and widgets for building high-performance, high-fidelity apps.
Initially, Flutter was designed to build native mobile apps for Android and iOS platforms, but with its latest release, Flutter 2, Google has expanded its capabilities to include web and desktop platforms. This means that developers can use Flutter to build apps for a wide range of devices and operating systems, such as Windows, macOS, Linux, and the web.
Flutter provides a modern and efficient way to build cross-platform apps, allowing developers to save time and reduce the complexity of maintaining separate codebases for each platform. With its unique features, such as hot reload, which allows developers to see changes in the app as they make them, Flutter enables developers to quickly iterate and test their code, resulting in faster development cycles and a more streamlined development process. Additionally, Flutter’s widget-based approach to building UI enables developers to create beautiful and responsive user interfaces with ease, reducing the need for platform-specific code and making it simpler to maintain the app across multiple platforms.
Flutter, the open-source SDK by Google, has taken the app development world by storm with its fast development capabilities. One of its most significant benefits is reducing code development time. Let’s take a closer look at how Flutter achieves this and why it is crucial for app development.
First, Flutter is designed to work with a single codebase for both Android and iOS platforms. This means that developers can write a single codebase for both platforms, which saves time and resources. By using Flutter, developers can create and maintain one codebase, reducing the need for separate teams and codes for each platform.
Second, Flutter’s reactive programming framework allows developers to see their changes instantly. The hot reload feature enables developers to make changes to the code, see the effects in real-time, and continue coding without any delay. This feature saves a considerable amount of time and helps developers experiment more freely, leading to quicker iterations.
Third, Flutter provides a vast library of customizable widgets that can be integrated into the app with ease. These pre-designed and customizable widgets help developers save time and ensure consistency in the user interface. The widgets library in Flutter includes a large set of Material and Cupertino widgets that perfectly mimic the behavior of each design language.
Using Flutter as a development language can be a game-changer for the market. Its ability to create apps for multiple platforms from a single codebase can significantly reduce development time and costs. Additionally, Flutter’s reactive programming framework and vast library of customizable widgets can enhance app performance and user experience. As a result, businesses can create high-quality apps in a shorter time frame, providing better services to their customers and staying competitive in the market.
2. Fast development: Flutter’s “hot reload” feature enables developers to see applied changes almost instantly, without losing the current application state, resulting in faster development times.
3. Beautiful user interfaces: Flutter provides a wide range of ready-to-use customizable widgets and design tools, enabling developers to create beautiful, responsive, and modern UIs.
4. Large community: Flutter has a large and active community of developers who contribute to the platform, offering a wealth of resources, tutorials, and support.
5. Good documentation: Flutter has extensive and well-organized documentation that is easy to navigate, making it easier for developers to learn the platform.
6. Performance: Flutter’s high-performance rendering engine allows apps to run smoothly on any device.
7. Open-source: Flutter is an open-source project, meaning developers can contribute to the platform and its ecosystem.
8. Widely used: Flutter is used by many big companies, such as Alibaba, Google, and Tencent, to create their apps.
9. Developer-friendly: Flutter is easy to learn and work with for developers who have experience with other programming languages.
10. Quick prototyping: Flutter’s fast development times and hot reload feature make it ideal for rapid prototyping.
11. Dart programming language: Flutter uses the Dart programming language, which is fast, efficient, and easy to learn.
12. Reactive programming: Flutter supports reactive programming, allowing for more efficient state management in your app.
13. Platform-specific widgets: Flutter provides platform-specific widgets that perfectly mimic the behavior of each design language, making your app look and feel native on any platform.
14. Testing: Flutter’s built-in testing and debugging tools make it easy to test your app on multiple devices, ensuring compatibility and quality.
15. Job opportunities: Flutter is a growing and in-demand technology, so learning and mastering it could lead to many job opportunities in the future.