In the simplest terms, Flutter is a software development toolkit from Google for building cross-platform applications. Flutter app consists of a series of packages, plugins, and widgets — but that’s not all.
It’s also the easiest way to get an app up and running on any one platform, let alone multiple. You can be more productive than you thought possible thanks to Flutter’s declarative, widget-based UI structure, first-class support for reactive programming, cross-platform abstractions, and its virtual machine that allows for hot reloading of code changes.
One thing Flutter is not is a language. Flutter uses Dart as its programming language. If you know Kotlin, Swift, Java, or Typescript, you’ll find Dart familiar, since it’s an object-oriented C-style language.
You can compile Dart to native code, which makes it fast. It also uses a virtual machine (VM) with a special feature: hot reload. This lets you update your code and see the changes live without redeploying it.
Why Flutter?
Open-Source Platform: It’s an open-source platform that makes it available for use and study by start-ups for any given purpose.
Custom Design and Navigation: It redraws a UI every time a view changes which provides a quick and smooth app development experience.
Quick testing and hot reload: With Flutter, you do not have to refresh the application to see the changes you made in the codebase.
Time and Cost-effective: With its single codebase programming feature for both android as well as iOS it saves a lot of time for developers and makes it super friendly.
Impressive and Customized Widgets: Developers are given major control over how they want the layout of their application to be and develop a successful application in less time.
Dart language: One of the best parts of flutter is it uses dart language which is one of the simplest programming languages with extraordinary speed and performance.
Ease of code sharing: Flutter stays true to the word of doing more or less code. Once the code is written in Flutter, almost 95% of it can be used over and again.
Object Orientation: The major problem with native app development that flutter set you to solve is creating a visual user experience. Flutter relies on object-oriented development.
Super productive: Developers are given major control over how they want the layout of their application to be and develop a successful application in less time.
Community Support and Documentation: The community around flutter is quite small compared to React and Ionic.
Why are companies using Flutter?
Nowadays, companies tend to consider cross-platform solutions in their development stack mainly for 3 reasons:
Faster Development: Working on a single codebase,
Lower Cost: Maintaining a single project instead of many (N projects for N platforms)
Consistency: The same UI and functionalities on any platform
Quicker to market
Plugins for every need
Better design and customizations
Flutter First Application
Observations:
This example creates a Material app. Material is a visual design language that is standard on mobile and the web. Flutter offers a rich set of Material widgets. It’s a good idea to have a uses-material-design: true entry in the flutter section of your pubspec.yaml file. This will allow you to use more features of Material, such as their set of predefined icons.
The app extends StatelessWidget, which makes the app itself a widget. In Flutter almost everything is a widget, including alignment, padding, and layout.
The Scaffold widget, from the Material library, implements the basic Material Design visual layout and also provides a default app bar and a body property that holds the widget tree for the home screen.
A widget’s main job is to provide a build () method that describes how to display the widget in terms of other, lower-level widgets.
The body of this example consists of a Center widget containing a Text child widget. The center widget aligns its widget subtree to the center of the screen.
Limitations of Flutter
- TVs, Watches, Cars
You can’t use flutter to build apps for tvOS, watchOS, CarPlay, or Android Auto.
Impact? You’ll have to use native code or an alternative framework to target these platforms.
- Vector graphics and animations
Support for vector formats isn’t perfect. The SVG package mostly works, but sometimes has issues.
Impact? Some files don’t render correctly with the current plugins. The alternative is 2Dimension’s Flare.
- Directly calling Native APIs from Dart
Flutter can interact with native platform APIs, but not directly.
Impact? In custom scenarios, you’ll have to write native swift or java/kotlin code to interact with the native APIs.
- Native Platform Views
Sometimes you need to use native UI elements such as maps and web views. Flutter support embedding these but it’s in preview and there are a few issues.
Impact? The most popular issues include the Google Maps plugin, WebView plugin, and platform views.
- Code Pushing
It allows developers to instantly push patches to their + continuous deployment + with no extra new release. Flutter doesn’t support this.
Impact? All updates for flutter apps have to go through the standard app store release process, which is very time taking.
Conclusion
Flutter framework does a great job by providing an excellent framework to build mobile applications in a truly platform-independent way. By providing simplicity in the development process, high performance in the resulting mobile application, and rich and relevant user interface for both Android and iOS platforms, Flutter framework will surely enable a lot of new developers to develop high-performance and feature-full mobile applications in the near future.
Thank You!