Why flutter is trending on mobile app development industry

Posted by Christina James on April 15th, 2021

The popularity of mobile apps is enormous these days. It is so popular that most of the websites have their apps. New applications are getting added to Playstore and AppStore every day. The app stores of both Android and iPhone are flooded with applications. 

Traditionally the developers had to design two separate applications for Android and iOS. It took a lot of time and effort. The organizations even had two different teams for developing apps for both the operating systems.  

Hybrid apps work across different platforms and still function as efficiently as native apps. It contains the elements of both native and web applications. It is the perfect mixture of both. Some of the popular hybrid apps include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

There is no requirement for a separate team of developers for developing the app for Android and iOS. It proves to be more efficient and cost-effective; it speeds up the development time. It makes the life of developers much more effortless. You can see the changes made in the code reflect in the application in real-time in hot reloading. It saves a lot of time and makes it efficient. And in a hot restart, the preserved state values are set to default, so you get a freshly compiled application after every hot restart.

Another advantage of hybrid app development is the minimal learning curve. As you only have to develop the app once on any cross platforms, the learning curve is minimal. It is a high advantage for the developers. When they start, they need not learn a whole set of new languages to get on track.

Flutter

In simple terms, Flutter is a software development tool developed by Google and launched in 2017. The main programming language used is dart also c and c++ is used. It can be used in different platforms like android, iOS, Microsoft Windows, Linux making it a cross-platform development framework.

There are many wonderful apps developed using Flutter. Some of them are Alibaba, Hamilton Musical (Music app), Coach Yourself (Health and fitness app), Birch Finance (Finance related app), Hookle ( Social app). Here you can see the wide range of industries using Flutter.

Why Flutter and its superiority over the existing technologies

The most striking feature of Flutter is that the same codebase can be used for both android and iOS platforms which gives it superiority over native languages.

There is no requirement for a separate team of developers for developing the app for android and iOS. This feature makes Flutter more efficient and cost-effective. It speeds up the development time. And what makes it superior over other cross-platform technologies is its high productivity because of the compiling done with c and c++ engines. This gives it superiority in both android and iOS platforms.

Hot Reload and Hot Restart

This makes the life of developers much easier. You can see the changes made in the code reflect in the application in real-time in hot reloading. It saves a lot of time and makes it efficient. And in the hot restart, the preserved state values are set to default, so you get a freshly compiled application after every hot restart.

Minimal Learning Curve

The perfect documentation of flutter has helped it gain a lot of popularity among developers. This has helped in the rapid growth of its usage. The effort the team has put into the documentation is appreciable, so even the fresher developers could learn it themselves. And it is undoubtedly a very strong skill set to achieve. And the effort put by the Google team to popularize it also plays a major role. It is one reason why flutter app development is trending in the mobile app development industry.

One UI Design

We often see how an app looks different on Android and iOS. But using Flutter, since there is the same code base, the UI looks the same on both platforms. So this helps the users while shifting from Android to iOS or vice-versa.

Flutter also provides a lot of built-in components and libraries, including Material designs and Cupertino widgets. This helps in building UI that is very similar to native UI. Flutter provides very beautiful UI designs.

Similar to Native App Performance

Even when Flutter is a cross platform framework, it offers a performance similar to that of a native app. In most cases, it is even difficult to tell the difference. The reason is its lack of dependence on any intermediate code representation, which results in improved performance. The components of Flutter are built-in; there is no bridge in between.

Own Rendering Engine

One of the most powerful features of Flutter is undoubtedly this. The presence of a very strong framework is what makes Flutter different from other cross platform frameworks. Flutter uses Skia as its rendering engine. And Skia helps it to launch on any platform without any difficulties. And this gives Flutter a high hand over many cross platform frameworks.

Dart as Programming Language

As mentioned above, Flutter is written in Dart. Dart is an object-oriented programming language that supports inheritance, interface etc. One of the main objectives of the Dart programming language is to keep it simple and stable. Being simple increases its popularity amongst programmers, especially those who are willing to learn new things; this increases the language's popularity. It has many libraries and tools, which makes it apt to develop big applications. Dart is a general-purpose programming language that can build mobile apps, desktop apps, and web-based apps.

Flutter is believed to take over the future of mobile app development. Its increasing popularity and high-quality documentation can remain superior to the existing cross-platform frameworks.

In Conclusion

A single code base for both operating systems is worth mentioning. It gives you all the tools for developing both android and iOS applications. With hybrid apps, you can develop apps for the two audience sets without much extra effort and time. No wonder it is becoming a developer's favorite. 

Its primary focus is on the functionality of the User Interface. Traditionally, hybrid apps developed on the cross-platform are known to be low-performance apps but React Native has broken the norms. Its rich UI and high performance are similar to apps made in native languages. The app's seamless performance makes it difficult to identify if it is developed in the native language.

Hybrid app development is going to be the future. React Native, Flutter, etc., are some of the best available cross-platform supports. The apps made from these platforms are as good as Native apps. It takes out a lot of costs and human effort too. These platforms are also simple to learn and use. So for beginners, it will be of great help.