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In the era of emerging and ever-growing technology, Mobile App development has become a vital requirement for any business. Low data tariffs and efficiently featured low-cost smartphones have led to a steady increase in the number of smartphone users. Mobile Apps can effectively increase the reach of the business to the public making the interaction much easier. It can reinforce the brand value and provide the owner with a seamless experience to collaborate with their target audience. The growing demand for mobile apps increases the demand for highly skilled developers who can develop effective and interactive applications that can meet the requirements of both the owner and customers.
Flutter Vs Android
Over a long time, Android has globally dominated the App Development market as nearly 75% of the world population prefers using Android as against 15% of iOS. Though Android is Very stable and gives a great performance across various sizes of Android devices it comes with a huge amount of boilerplate code which hinders the innovation and creativity of a developer which is the main reason why one should look for some cross-platform solutions, like Flutter. Before jumping straight into Flutter let’s have a look at what I exactly mean by the term “Cross-Platform”. A cross-platform application is a type of software application that is implementable on multiple platforms and devices without encountering any difficulty. Developers generally face a challenge to develop applications for multiple platforms as the business needs to target both iOS and Android users due to which two separate codebases have to be maintained and updated regularly which leads to many difficulties. Here Flutter comes to the rescue.
How Flutter Evolved
Image credit: appinventiv.com
Flutter, according to Google is defined as Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. On December 4, 2018, Flutter 1.0 was released at the Flutter Live event, denoting the first “stable” version of the Framework. Since then Flutter has improved a lot in terms of performance.
How is Flutter different?
It is a dynamic, cross-platform framework, with all the integrated widgets and tools that result in faster app development.
In Flutter, Everything is a widget.
Flutter surpasses the traditional limitations of cross-platform applications.
Makes the app development process much faster.
Debugging is made easy with hot reload.
Low-Cost Maintenance.
So, what do all these terms exactly mean, why Flutter has a bright future, and why do developers believe that Flutter is the future of Mobile App development? Let's discuss this. Here are the 5 major reasons:
1. Uses Dart as the Language Dart is an object-oriented, class-defined, garbage-collected language using a C-style syntax that trans-compiles optionally into JavaScript.
2. Testing Made Easy One can easily get rid of the hassle of testing the app for various platforms as Flutter has a single code base which makes it effortless for testing. The app can be tested based on functionality, user interface, usability, and logical formation in a single platform of the application, without wasting time testing multiple platforms.
3. Customizable Widgets Flutter contains a list of widgets for designing UI interfaces. These widgets are customizable and reusable, making them useful for further development.
4. Hot Restart and Hot Reload Let’s have a look at what these fancy terms exactly mean. Hot reload implements the change in your UI in a couple of seconds, without reloading the whole app or messing with inputs and variables. It also helps in fixing bugs. The changes get instantly reflected on the screen as the Dart Virtual Machine gets the source code, updates it, and displays the changes immediately. Hot restart, on the other hand, saves time by just implementing the functionality based on the recent changes made in the app in less than 10secs without restarting the whole app. Restarting the whole app would’ve done the same thing, but it would’ve done it in 40 seconds. Therefore, Hot restart saves developers time.
5. Cost Effective Yet High On Performance Flutter app development comes with a number of cost-saving factors:
- low developmental effort
- single codebase
- low maintenance timeline
All these come together to get its cost range down to a huge extent. Flutter is the quickest way to deliver high-performing, cross-platform mobile applications. All these aspects make Flutter a perfect solution for business. Learning Flutter can be fruitful and rewarding in every way in this technical era. Hence all these factors make Flutter an apt choice for developers.