Why I loved Flutter despite being a fan of Native App Development

In this post, I am going to write about Flutter based on my opinions. Please don’t hesitate to comment if you want to discuss, support or contradict any of the mentioned points 🙂

What is Flutter

“Flutter is Google’s portable UI toolkit for crafting beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Flutter works with existing code, is used by developers and organizations around the world, and is free and open source.” (from official Flutter website)

In the mobile development perspective, Flutter is a cross-platform mobile application development framework that is developed by Google and supports building apps for IOS and Android operating systems from a single codebase with native-like performance.

Cross-platform frameworks in general

I was always against developing apps with cross-platform tools however they are good options in terms of required resources such as they require less development time, less budget, less effort to maintain/support, etc. But for me, these factors are not much important somehow. Which things I didn’t like and made me avoid learning/developing cross-platform are:

• Low performance, Poor UI – to be honest, I haven’t even played around with any cross-platform development. The fact which makes me come up with the ideas of cross-platform having low performance and poor UI is originated from the impressions I got from the usage cross-platform developed apps. Most of the time when I start using apps and see the bad performance and UI, unfortunately, I end up knowing that they are cross-platform developed apps.
• It requires learning a new language – since I’m an android developer, I would rather choose to learn Swift for native IOS development so I will be able to develop for both platforms.

Dart language

Dart is a client-optimized programming language for fast apps on multiple platforms. It is developed by Google and is used to build mobile, desktop, backend and web applications. Dart is an object-oriented, class defined, garbage-collected language using a C-style syntax that transcompiles optionally into JavaScript. (wikipedia)

Dart code is capable of being compiled into machine code. For mobile application development, Flutter uses this type of compilation which is Ahead-of-time compilation. This is the reason which makes Flutter distinguish from other cross-platform app development frameworks and lets an app developed in Flutter have native-like performance.

Things I liked about Flutter development

• Faster code writing
• Rich in UI components – lots of flutter widgets to build eye-catching UI
• Native-like application performance
• Instant hot reload – see the changes within seconds
• No need to extra code to support older Android versions

Limitation

• Less third-party libraries are available

Conclusion

The reason I wrote this blogpost is that Flutter caught my attention and I decided to give it a try. So I cloned the main page of the simple news application which is in the Play Store. Then I started to love Flutter because while the development process I easily found all the widgets that I needed to make the clone app look similar as much as possible to the original app. In the end, the result impressed me so much and I was convinced to learn more about flutter development.

I would also recommend you to give it a try. Especially, if you need to have MVP for your project then go for it. You will benefit from the advantages of cross-platform development such as faster development, less time to test, less effort to bugfix and maintenance and advantages of flutter such as native-like performance, great UI.

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There is also one more thing I want to mention that, apps for Google’s Fuchsia OS are written in Flutter. I am not going to write about Fuchsia OS here, but briefly, it is assumed that Fuchsia OS can be Google’s next mobile OS or maybe replacement to Android OS (depending on the result of the problem between Google and Oracle). But it is hard to say how probable is that to happen. Anyway… The reason I mentioned this issue is to show you that – assuming that happened, then it is gonna be really valuable if you already know and have experience with Flutter. 🙂

Helpful resources which I think are worth to check:

• Youtube playlist: Flutter Widget of the Week
• https://dev.to/jay_tillu/dart-the-language-behind-flutter-and-fuchsia-os-4d38