Flatter Yourself With Flutter Mobile App Development

Building a great product that resonates with their customer's needs comes with unique challenges for every business. From the technical aspects for businesses, one such challenge is to select the right platform for your digital product & on top of that, the right technology framework/stack behind it to ensure that the application touches your expectations & serves your customers as per their needs & preferences.

At the same time.

• It is also essential to create designs that focus on simplicity & relevance to the target market.
• Moving forward, you are tied to a budget you can’t stretch.

Similarly, there are many more challenges that you need to cope with while building your dream product.

What if we say that Flutter is the answer to most of your questions?

Well, We understand you need some genuinely compelling reasons to justify our suggestion,n so here we are today to help you understand how Flutter enables you to launch beautiful & faster applications with better performance within an optimal budget; & why Flutter has become the most popular framework for developers.

What is Flutter? : A Quick Introduction

According to the official Flutter development team (Google):

Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled mobile, web, and desktop applications from a single codebase.”

• Let’s decode this quote: Google’s UI toolkit Google advertised Flutter as an intelligent tool capable of building complex UIs with relative ease and speed. Though now, Flutter's SDK and plug-ins support almost any functionality you want in your app, from networking, storage, and Bluetooth to GPS.
• Beautiful Flutter has a vast compilation of UI components (Widgets) for every possible need of UI modeling. These widgets can mimic the same Material design UI and Cupertino UI for both platforms, Android and iOS, respectively.

Smooth transitions and animations are comparatively easy to code in Flutter than their native counterparts. And a plus point from the UX point of view, you can mix and match the UX or even create the same UX and feel of your Android and iOS apps. Natively Compiled Applications

When you listen to the word ‘cross-platform,’ your mind compels us to think there must be a ‘catch.’Either there will be a performance decline in the apps or any limitations to how complex your app can be. This is not entirely false. In the early cross-platform technologies, the app's logic your team worked on NEVER compiled into native code.

For example, apps developed in React Native have the logic of a Javascript bundle inside your app directory. But Flutter stood out in the cross platforms popularity race. Your code in Flutter is compiled into the native code to provide you with a native-like feel and performance.

You can even code in the native platforms languages and make it work with your Flutter code. Mobile, Web, and Desktop from a single codebase Flutter extensively supports mobile and desktop application development. While it keeps the Web, too, to date, Flutter Web is in beta and will soon be stable for Web development.

Quick Information About Flutter-

• It’s a Freebie: Open Source
• Flutter offers Cross-Platform app development
• It’s an SDK; not a Language
• Flutter uses Dart as its programming language, created by Google in 2011.
• Flutter includes two essential parts:
  • SDK - A kit of tools that allows you to develop applications. It includes the means to compile your code in native device code (iOS or Android)
  • Framework - A collection of UI components that you can customize
  • Flutter supports Integration with Android (Java or Kotlin) & iOS (Swift or Objective C)

The Growth of Flutter

• Flutter was created by Google & released in May 2017.
• Soon after its release, Flutter became the faster-growing mobile app platform offering all developers a sophisticated app development process.

Below is the stats on Cross-Platform Mobile Frameworks used by Software Developers Worldwide in 2019 and 2020

• According to the GitHub stats, we can see that Flutter has more Stars than React Native.
  • React Native - 91.2K Stars (November 2020)!
  • Flutter - 106K Stars (November 2020)

Why Engage with Flutter?

Flutter offers Cross-Platform Opportunities: Reducing Your Development Costs

You’re now up with a product idea & want to target as many users as possible, but also tied with a budget. Requirements are three different apps (Android, iOS & Web) & hence three separate costs. No! This is where cross-platform app development comes into play. It helps you launch your application into different platforms while writing the core code once. Since Flutter offers cross-platform app development, you can use Flutter to develop apps for Android, IOS, Linux, Mac, Windows, Google Fuchsia(by google), and the web.

Flutter Web is still in beta but will soon be stable to use. Through this, Flutter can offer uniformity, dynamic apps, debugging, and user interfaces effortlessly to experiment. Hence, Flutter helps you launch your application for Mobile, Web & Desktop OS by investing in a single codebase, While native apps require specific coding for each OS separately. Which means just one single code & the right technology partner.

It’s a Freebie: An Open-Source Tool Backed by Google

Flutter being open-source, offers a diverse interaction for whoever wants to use this platform. It’s more like a collaboration when you use it. The source code is hosted in GitHub and getting support from the community with more than 100 pull requests to date.

Have a suggestion or an alarming issue affecting your team’s speed? Leave an open topic or a question on their repository page. You have a chance that the framework developers may assist you whenever you encounter any trouble in your application development process.

The Hot Reload Feature: Faster Time-To-Market Speed

Since Flutter offers cross-platform development & you don't need to code your apps separately for different platforms; therefore, the developer needs to only invest time in writing a single codebase. Another way Flutter offers a faster development process is the Hot Reload feature.

Hot reload is a life-saver.No need to rebuild your app for every change. This Hot Reload feature allows a developer to make changes to the application without rebuilding/clicking the build button every time. Hot reload compares the new changes with the previous ones and rebuilds only where the change happened. As a result, you can check out new UI flows, stay signed in or within the same screen while testing the new UI for the screen, reiterate the look and feel of a button faster than ever.

Have a look: And with the power of compounding applied to the time saved during development, comparatively small sprints and milestones are achieved faster. This way, Flutter improves the overall productivity of the app development process & allows you to launch your product in a shorter time.

High-Performing, Faster & Beautiful Apps: Near-Native Experience

Flutter uses Dart language to write the code for your applications, which has a similar syntax to Java and power like Javascript. Unlike other Cross-Platform frameworks, Flutter compiles the applications into native binaries that rely on Graphics & Rendering engine. As a result, it produces faster & high-performing applications.

At the same time, Flutter offers Flexible UI capabilities. Using Flutter, you can build beautiful applications that provide an experience similar to native apps. The layered architecture of Flutter lets you control every pixel on the screen & make it easier to customize apps. It also has built-in UI components that can be easily customized.

Flutter uses the Skia Graphics Library - The user interface is built & rendered on a Skia canvas. Instead of using Native UI components, Flutter renders directly to the screen using the Skia rendering engine - so there is nothing in the middle to slow things down. This way, Flutter updates the UI at 60fps & most of the work done is on GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)

Better Team Management - Single Codebase, Single Team

In this era of ever-changing market needs, speed is everything. And the speed in software is always compromised with the need to support multiple platforms. Secondly, businesses are restricted by a famous rule that proved, like a scientific law of nature, that there is always a tradeoff between quality and speed.

Flutter solves both concerns for you: A single framework and a single language - Dart automatically reduces team diversification, brings everyone on the same page, and, apparently, more hands on the deck regarding production-level bugs and updates on both platforms’ official App stores. The dream of a single codebase is not limited to large-screen devices. The Flutter team is also experimenting with supporting embedded devices and wearables.

Read Also: Want to Ace Project Management? Go Agile!!

Design: not limited to UI

To build a feature-ready app with scalability, maintainability, and testability, App Architecture and sound state management are necessary. Google knew that and engineered a design pattern specifically made to suit Flutter-style coding, BLoC, known as Business Logic Component .

Flutter supports various state-management patterns like ChangeNotifier, Provider, MobX, etc. Solutions like CodeMagicenables Continuous Integration and Deployment for your Flutter Apps. Even sophisticated apps have some disadvantages which they need to fix. Similarly, Flutter also has its cons.

Constraints that might disappoint

Dart may not be that native to your team

Dart is an object-oriented programming language that is used in Flutter. It may be easy to learn Dart, but it is still not as familiar as its peer,s C#, Java, Swift, etc. For this reason, you need to pick resources or hire a development team who are efficient with Dart selectively because not all are familiar with Dart.

iOS trouble

Although Google is a successful company in developing android apps that are enjoyable and fast, it is still facing some challenges regarding the iOS operating system. Flutter can fix bugs and make updates in the Android app in seconds. But when it comes down to iOS devices, it lacks that thunderbolt speed. While iOS 11 is running in the market, Flutter is still trying to update to iOS 10.

Third-Party Libraries

Old is gold! Even though flutter has the best UI packages, it lacks a few classic packages that third parties could have included. But it doesn’t allow you access to third-party libraries and widgets. So you may miss them. But Flutter also offers pretty good packages that might suffice your needs.

Storage problem!

We all know how annoying the full storage notification is. Flutter inevitably is an excellent app that produces the best UX-providing apps as end products. But everything comes with a price, and to get the best apps that flutter offers, you may need to have Bigger storage.But denying these odds, many product companies have chosen Flutter, starting but not limited to Google itself.

Road-map to some of the Best apps developed using Flutter

• Google Pay (payment) Formerly known as Tez, Google Pay created an app for the Indian subcontinent to provide better alternatives for quick and safe payments, filled with rewards on payment behavior. As posted in their blog , the choice to continue with flutter had roots in the need for clean UI across platforms, faster development, scaling quicker than ever because of the increasing popularity of the App
• Google Ads (business) Google ads help users run marketing campaigns smoothly and increase their customer base without hassle. Along with the stunning design, they provide real-time alerts, campaign statistics, and Budget everything at one-tap reach.
• Reflectly (Journal & Lifestyle) Reflectly is a journal and mindfulness app allowing you to create stories in a personal journal after asking a series of questions to reflect on the day. This AI-based the app is for relieving the mental stress of a person and is beautifully designed using flutter.
• Alibaba Xianyu (shopping) Alibaba’s second-largest retail, Xianyu, is an online shopping portal with 10 million online subscribers. This was created using Flutter. That sounds like a considerable achievement.
• Space X go (Education) For Tesla's space division, flutter introduced an application that provides you with all the updates regarding the launches that will be taking place. Flutter offers easy navigation in this app.

Wrapping Up

With everything said and done! You can see how Flutter has diversified in various aspects, offering mobile application development solutions. It provides cutting-edge solutions for all your app development problems. Being the best cross-platform services source powered by Google, the Flutter forum has been the evolving business.

It extends application development to a new level, from large organizations to small companies. It brings the vision you had in your mind to an app that goes live on the market. Saving your budget and time is a great option for your application development journey!! Each business is different, & so each application is different. That is why it is essential to go after the technology stack that supports your goals in the long run.

If you are unsure which technology stack to choose for your dream application or wish to understand if Flutter is the right choice for you - give us a shout. https://quokkalabs.com/blog/flutter-mobile-app-development-guide/

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