What is Flutter ?

Cross-platform applications are a long-standing dream of any business, because separate native iOS and Android apps are more expensive to develop and maintain. Flutter offers a quick way to create visually attractive apps for both operational systems, desktop computers, and the web from a single codebase. It is actively used and promoted by Google, and we expect that it will become universally popular in the near future.

Flutter is an open-source mobile SDK developer can use to build native-looking Android and iOS applications from the same code base. Flutter has been around since 2015 when Google introduced it and remained in the beta stage before its official launch in December 2018. Since then, the buzz around Flutter has been growing stronger.

Flutter is now the top 11 software repos based on GitHub stars. Moreover, we’ve already seen thousands of Flutter apps being published on app stores. One of the most notable examples is the Xianyu app created by Alibaba team, used by over 50 million people.

Flutter — here’s how it works

The central idea behind Flutter is the use of widgets. It’s by combining different widgets that developers can build the entire UI. Each of these widgets defines a structural element (like a button or menu), a stylistic element (a font or color scheme), a layout aspect (like padding), and many others.

Note that Flutter doesn’t use OEM widgets, but providers developers with its own ready-made widgets that look native to Android or iOS apps (following Material Design or Cupertino). Naturally, developers can create their own widgets as well.

Flutter also provides developers with reactive-style views. To avoid performance issues deriving from using a compiled programming language to serve as the JavaScript bridge, Flutter uses Dart. It compiles Dart ahead of time (AOT) into the native code for multiple platforms.

That way, Flutter can easily communicate with the platform without needing a JavaScript bridge that involves a context switch between the JavaScript realm and the native realm. As you can imagine, compiling to native code also boosts the app startup time.

Today, Flutter is the only mobile SDK that offers reactive views without the need for a JavaScript bridge. That’s why so many mobile developers have been trying it out in their projects.

Here are some more benefits Flutter brings to mobile software development.

Extra advantage: Dart programming language

One of the most interesting features of Flutter is the language it uses: Dart. Like other systems that use reactive views, Flutter refreshes the view tree for every new frame. To accomplish that, it creates many objects that may live for no more than one frame. Dart uses generational garbage collection that has proven to be very efficient for this type of systems.

Moreover, Dart has a “tree shaking” compiler that only includes the code you need in your app. Even if you need just a widget or two, you can use its large library of widgets freely.

Finally, Dart comes with a repository of software packages for extending the capabilities of apps. For example, it offers a few packages that help to access Firebase so that developers can build serverless apps. Another package allows accessing a Redux data store or makes it easier to access platform services and hardware like the camera.

Benefits of Flutter

• It saves you time and money
• Excellent performance
• Hot Reload
• Compatibility
• OpenSource