Introduction
This blog covers everything you need to know about Flutter, its benefits, challenges & future of Flutter. If you decide to use the Flutter framework instead of any other framework for your cross-platform application, it will be the best decision you can make.
Before learning about it, let’s see why having a cross-platform application is crucial. This is because the world is broadly divided into 2 Operating Systems, Android & other iOS. Out of the total number of phone users, 70% are Android users while around 29% of total mobile users are using iOS which makes it 1.46 Billion users. If anyone has an application for any one operating system, that person is missing out on a large number of audience who are its potential customers.
Making native applications for both operating systems can be the solution but it also becomes hard to manage and requires high capital and time, for the solution to these cross-platform applications to be introduced. There are several frameworks to make a cross-platform application like React Native, Ionic, Flutter, etc.
Among all these Flutter is the most famous, preferable, and most used framework. Let us know why Flutter is so popular and highly preferred by developers.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is an open-source framework (a programming language is a tool while a framework is a work platform.) developed by Google. Flutter was launched by Google in 2018, at the time of launch its primary focus was on mobile app development. Currently, it supports application development for six platforms: iOS, Android, the web, Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
Benefits of using Flutter.
We know that the Flutter framework is the developer’s first preference for building a cross-platform application. But the reason behind Flutter’s rapid growth is as follows:-
Fast and Efficient Development:
The hot reload feature is one of the best features of the Flutter framework, it allows developers to immediately go through the changes they made in code without restarting the application. This feature speeds up the process of development by allowing for quick iterations, experimentation, and bug fixing. Flutter has a huge variety of pre-designed widgets and extensive libraries that boost development and reduce the time to market for mobile applications.
Beautiful and Native-Like User Interfaces:
Flutter facilitates developers with a wide range of widgets & advanced tools to create stunning and native-like interfaces. Flutter helps developers create visually appealing and responsive UI designs that can adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions, here widgets also provide a similar look & feel across various platforms.
Excellent Performance:
Flutter’s speed & efficiency are also a great reason for Flutter’s rapid growth Using the Dart programming language, Flutter apps are turned into native machine code, so there's no extra work to interpret the code, which improves performance. Also, Flutter's UI rendering engine, Skia, draws graphics directly on the screen, leading to smooth animations and responsive user interfaces.
Strong Community and Ecosystem:
Developers across the world are part of Flutter's vibrant & rapidly growing community, this community is continually expanding by contributing to the development of open-source packages, libraries, and plugins. Access to the huge collection of pre-built solutions and community support makes it easier for developers to implement complex functionalities, integrate APIs, and solve common development challenges.
famous applications made on Flutter
We go through the benefits of using Flutter, but the question is whether it is so beneficial as compared to other frameworks.
Here is the list of some top applications for various industries made on Flutter
1- Google ads
Google Ads is one of the most famous platforms for managing advertisement operations it allows businesses and individuals to display ads to global audiences through the Google search engine. There are more than 10 million Google ads users on Android
2- eBay motors
eBay Motors, owned by eBay helps users to search and buy vehicles, as well as vehicle parts and accessories. It also allows users to connect with resellers. eBay motors android app has more than 1 million downloads
3- MyBMW
My BMW app enables BMW owners to interact with their cars to lock, unlock, locate, monitor, and navigate using their mobile. On the Android platform, the MyBMW app has more than 1 million downloads
4- Google Pay
Google Pay is the most popular digital wallet with over 1 billion active users. It allows users to manage and spend their money easily and effortlessly through their mobile devices.
5- New York Times
The New York Times has more than 1 million active users, it allows the user to read, watch & listen to original content for topics that touch the readers’ daily lives, including opinion, arts and culture, business, tech, wellness, and much more.
Pain points while using Flutter
1- platform-specific features
Flutter helps to develop applications for multiple platforms with a single codebase, but it also raises a problem of functionality. There are some platform-specific features that work on that particular platform only, generally, these functions are included in the application to make it more user-friendly for that particular platform. Hence it becomes more complicated to develop applications with these features, to use these features you have to be familiar with both iOS & android development
The second point is related to this problem only that is a learning curve.
2- learning curve
Flutter is one of the most famous & rapidly growing frameworks. Still, some developers will not be familiar with Flutter, additionally one should also be familiar with Dart language and Flutter’s widget-based architecture, state management, and reactive programming model can take time to learn, it also takes time to learn about the basics of other platforms for a native app developer.
It will take much effort to gain expertise in the Flutter framework but the results are also worth all efforts.
3- device specific testing
Applications compatible with multiple platforms with a single codebase are developed with the help of the Flutter framework, this also comes up with a problem, which is to ensure the application is working properly on all platforms & browsers. Each browser may render the application differently which leads to an increase in bugs & decrease in efficiency.
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