What Is Flutter? Its Benefits and Limitations
The mobile development market is rapidly gaining momentum in recent years. In 2019, it was expected that it will cover 2.5 billion users and more than 80 billion dollars with the prospect of further growth. Gradually, there have been formed three key niches, which are the development for Android, iOS, and cross-platform solutions, that determine the market further development. The latter emerged as a way to quickly create applications for both dominant platforms, sacrificing the power of native development. The most famous solutions in this area were PhoneGap by Adobe, Xamarin by Microsoft, React Native by Facebook. In 2017, Google joined the group by introducing its Flutter framework at the annual Google I/O Conference. In December 2018, the stable version of Flutter was released, which turned it from an experimental SDK into a fully suitable for a commercial development tool.
What’s Flutter Anyway?
Flutter was a startup initiated by YC in 2013, after which Google acquired it. It is an open-source framework that can develop cross-platform applications using one codebase. Hence Flutter Android development is very same as its IOS development. This makes the development of apps smooth, easy, and quick. The language used to code in flutter is Dart, developed by Google, and unique to Flutter.
Developers can also use platform-specific widgets to make their app have a native-developed feel to it. This will keep the end-user satisfied, and developers can save a lot of time and effort while developing. Besides all this, Flutter has a charming and flexible UI which contributes a lot to a user-friendly UX. All of these features make flutter a must use in app development. You can also say this Google Flutter is the new React Native.
Flutter Timeline
Flutter’s beta version was launched on 13th March 2018 and it was first to live on 4th December 2018. In such a short amount of time, Flutter has already established its position in the market. Let’s take a look at the graph below to understand the popularity of Flutter as compared to other mobile platforms.
Does Flutter Have Any Benefits?
There are a number of benefits that Flutter offers to the entrepreneurs that make them look ahead to app development using Flutter.
Free and open source
It’s an open-source project which makes it available for use and study by start-ups for any given purpose. It’s more or less like an open-collaboration, hence making it easily accessible and user friendly. It not only gives you a diverse scope for design but also no other company provides you with as many options
Amazing Widget catalog
The best part about flutter is that you have a wide range of widgets beautifully cataloged for you. Not only does it make it hassle-free but also helps you make a functionally amazing app. You use Dart to write your Flutter app which is compiled to native code. The IntelliJ plugin makes for good integration.
It’s Inherent Graphic Library
Flutter uses the Skia — built-in library for rendering. This makes it more platform-independent. The SDK provides a rich set of widgets, in particular, the Material and Cupertino collections for rendering native-like widgets for Android and iOS. By combining various widgets, you get the opportunity to create a complex UI. Thanks to its own library, Flutter applications look the same on different versions of operating systems. Thus it is good to solve one of the main problems of mobile development today — the great variability of mobile devices.
Hot Reload
One of the drawbacks of compiled languages before scripting languages is the loss of time for building a project. With frequent edits, it can take up a substantial part of the working time. The Flutter Hot Reload feature allows you to display the effect of your edits in the code immediately.
Compatibility
Since widgets are part of the app and not the platform, you’ll likely experience less or no compatibility issues on different OS versions. This in turn means less time spent on testing.
Development Expectations for Fuchsia OS
Flutter is currently the only tool for creating applications for the Fuchsia OS from Google. For several years now, the new operating system has aroused the interest of developers and questions about its purpose. Particularly ardent fans call it the “Android killer,” which should blur the line between mobile, desktop, and web development. At Google itself, the new operating system is evaluated more restrainedly — as a testing ground for testing new ideas and experiments. Nevertheless, with the further development of Fuchsia, development experience with Flutter will allow you to quickly master a new niche in the software development market.
We’ve talked about Flutter and Fuchsia’s combination in detail in our previous blog. Do check that out.
It Gives You Java Feels
Dart isn’t exactly like Java but has similar features. It makes it really easy for developers to make the shift. Flutter comes with a better widget, great editorial integrations, and easy to use features that make this kit a great option to develop apps.
That’s not it, this framework is loaded with benefits that enhance the experience of the app for any user as well for the developer building it, those are:
What Flutter Can’t Do: Limitations
Although Flutter seems to be the future of app development with its continuous development and over the top features, there are a few limitations of Flutter which are yet to be improved.
Lack of Third-Party Libraries and Widgets
Flutter is not too old unlike its contemporaries and lacks the presence of third-party libraries. Although, it gives an amazing UI package, yet the requirement of third-party libraries for extensive development is still awaited.
For example, it’s rather easy to find libraries for React Native than Flutter. Also, some widgets in Flutter are specific to one platform. This may make some developers move away from Flutter if what they need is not available for their target platform.
Code Pushing
Code push allows developers to instantly push patches to their apps without going through the usual app store release process.
Bugs can be fixed without a new release, allowing a more web-like continuous development process. It’s supported by React Native, Cordova, and Ionic. Flutter doesn’t support this.
TVs, Watches & Cars
You can’t use Flutter to build apps for tvOS, watchOS, CarPlay, or Android Auto. There’s some limited support for Wear OS (formerly Android Wear). Flutter has to add Bitcode support to deploy to tvOS and watchOS. You’ll have to use native code or an alternative framework to target these platforms.
Some Top Performing Application Built With Flutter
Flutter Showcase consists of a plethora of applications that are increasing in multiple folds each day with large enterprises trusting flutter for their large userbase apps shows the amount of trust that Flutter offers.
Of the hundereds of applications built, there are some apps that really stood out, like:
Reflectly:
Reflectly is a personal journal and diary driven by artificial intelligence to enable you to deal with negative thoughts, make positivity louder, and to teach you about the science of well-being. An award-winning mindfulness app built with Flutter. It was featured on the Apple App Store as an ‘app of the day’.
Having 1 Million+ downloads with a rating of 4.3 from over 30,000 users.
Hamilton:
This is the official application for one of the famous award-winning Broadway musicals — Hamilton. It was built specifically for its large community of fans to stay updated with all music-related news.
The app offers, along with other things, a karaoke feature for those who want to sing along to their favorite songs, access to a number of different Hamilton lotteries, a daily trivia game. The user experience of the app is outstanding on both platforms.
The app currently has 500,000+ users.
What Do We Think of Flutter?
Flutter was not always the same. We at FlutterDevs have been working on Flutter since it’s inception, its alpha release and we’ve seen Flutter and it’s community grow. There were a lot of challenges initially, which were resolved by the community itself.
Our experience of using Flutter as our driving technology for mobile app development has been phenomenal. We have been building apps for more than 10 years now, we have seen and used a lot of cross-platform frameworks. But need I say Flutter is hands-down the best cross-platform mobile app development framework. It
And as we discussed above in this article, there are some limitations and shortcomings with all the amazingness that this framework offers. One of the biggest limitations that we felt is that even though it’s one of the most popular cross-platform frameworks at this moment, we still have a limited developer community for Dart. But we know for a fact that it’s steadily growing.
Another big limitation that we came across is that it’s very hard to find plugins for a lot of 3rd party SDKs. In-turn, the developers have to create a plug-in specifically for the SDK and which will result in a lot of extra time and money from a client’s perspective as well.
Being said that, there is no doubt that Flutter is one of the best frameworks that we’ve ever worked on. Flutter takes fewer efforts, less time, and smaller investments for app development. The community behind flutter is smaller yet determined to set a higher standard of cross-platform development in 2020 and beyond.
Closing Thoughts
Flutter is hot in the market ever since Google announced the first stable release. Looking at the features of Flutter, lots of questions arise. Will companies go for Flutter as the first choice of developing apps? Is it the beginning of the end of the native Android app development? Will Dart replace Java and Kotlin? Should native Android developers start learning Dart?
We’ll make no predictions or guesses here, but it could be the alarming bell for native mobile app developers that something like Flutter might affect their role in the future.
Love Flutter or hate Flutter, you cannot ignore it anymore.
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