From 2014, React Native reigned in the cross-platform development space. But from the end of 2017, the developers were surprised by the emergence of a more powerful, efficient, and performance-savvy framework called Flutter. While in terms of code reusability and modular development approach, Flutter brought several new approaches to the development space.
From widget-based development, doing away with the JavaScript bridge for connecting the native UI layer to support for web and desktop besides the mobile platforms, and several other reasons made Flutter a popular choice for app projects that want to release across multiple platforms without losing the native performance and user experience.
Let's explain some of the key reasons developers shared why they picked flutter for their app projects.
Achieving a Consistent User Interface (UI)
Sharing the same codebase across multiple platforms is the most common value proposition for most cross-platform frameworks and libraries. But achieving a consistent look and feel while maintaining platform-specific UI attributes is always challenging, and this is where Flutter as a framework appears to have the discreet capability.
Since, unlike other cross-platform development frameworks, Flutter does not need separate rendering for each particular platform involving complex tasks such as synchronization of widget data and animation effects, it helps build consistent UI for multiple platforms through its inbuilt platform-specific widgets.
Extending Cross-Platform Advantage to Web and Desktop
Cross-platform development is popular because of the code reusability across iOS and Android platforms. Well, this is the fundamental value proposition of most cross-platform frameworks. Flutter, in this regard, allows reusing the same code for desktop and web versions of the app as well.
Just think of the huge flexibility and advantage of extending to mobile, web, and desktop platforms simultaneously with just a singular development effort. Besides saving time and cost, this will help extend the brand presence to a wider audience with ease.
Quick Development Cycle
These days, building and releasing an app early has distinct cost and time advantages. Faster development time resulting in a quick launch gives an app a considerable edge over the competition. Any leading Flutter developer overloaded with many projects finds Flutter the ideal technology to respond to the increasing demand. The code reusability and widget-based development of Flutter ensure a much faster time to market for the app.
Flutter can reuse up to 80% of the core codebase, and it enables a modular development approach by using several different UI widgets. On top of that, Flutter comes with declarative APIs to ensure fast-paced development. All these aspects together make Flutter an ideal framework for developing and launching an app quickly.
Native User Experience & Performance
It doesn't need much reasoning to understand that building native apps are more expensive. You need to develop multiple apps separately by using native technologies while trying to achieve consistency in terms of look, feel, experience and performance.
With Flutter, you can build a cross-platform app that still offers platform-specific native performance and user experience for different platforms. Despite developing the apps directly by using machine code and without relying on the interpretation of the code for separate platforms, Flutter apps on all platforms offer a native performance and user experience.
Flutter to Meet Budget Constraints
Startups and small business owners often prefer Flutter because of its low-cost flutter app development. Apart from saving costs through faster development, Flutter also provides a modular development approach to help app projects develop the app incrementally over time.
The modular development approach of Flutter helps app developers to keep the initial flutter app development cost within limit while having options to make further value additions and changes based on the user feedback.
Hot Reload
Hot Reload is a modern feature to help app developers build and test an app quickly without going through the long cycles of testing code and waiting for the app to refresh or reload. Flutter comes with a Hot Reload feature to make debugging, testing, and app development much easier.
Thanks to this feature, any code changes are instantly reflected in the app and even while the app is running. The app doesn't need to be reloaded to evaluate the effects of the changes. This allows for making changes and value additions more frequently and easily.
Advantages of Dart Language
Flutter uses Dart programming language, an object-oriented, clean-typed language with a range of powerful and robust features. Dart comes with a well-equipped standard library providing modern features such as async-awaits, generic versions, clean typing, trash selection, and several others.
Dart can be a relatively new programming language, but it ensures powerful and clean coding, and the code looks much like Java. The learning curve is not too steep and is pretty robust for faster coding.
Custom Widgets
In Flutter, the entire app development works with a multitude of widgets. Flutter offers a robust range of ready-to-use widgets that help developers build the app quickly while maintaining native app performance and user experience.
Flutter offers a rich repository of widgets for all platforms, and by using them, you can develop the user interfaces of the apps quickly. Just after creating a widget, all you need to do is to adjust it to several different screen displays, resolutions, and operating system platforms. To create multilayered app functions, one widget can be wrapped inside another.
Wrapping Up
Last but not least, Flutter's advantages are that it perfectly suits the modern MVP development approach thanks to its modularity and component-based development. By using just a few widgets, you can create a functional and basic MVP in no time. This will decrease the complexity and cost of flutter app development for the initial phase. Later on, you can add more features and incorporate changes through subsequent updates.
Top comments (1)
it's a cool user interface, even we can build desktop, mobile apps too :)
could you give feedback about open source desktop applications ?
it's really made for developers :)