Is Flutter The Next Big Thing? - Let’s Find Out

Flutter, Flutter, Flutter! Since its release, it has been a buzz word in the programming community and tough competition to something called React Native. While Java and Kotlin are mainly used for android app development and Swift for iOS app development, Flutter is here to change the game. Since it’s release, mobile app developers around the globe have started getting hands-on Flutter slowly shifted to cross-platform app development using it rather than sticking to the native. While native has its own perks, let’s skip it for now and might be a discussion for some other time, is Flutter the next big thing for cross-platform app development after React Native? Let’s find out…

Well, since Flutter is quite young, it won’t be fair to make a statement about how good or bad a technology is. It will take a few more years for flutter to grow and get matured, but surely it seems quite promising. Meanwhile, let’s discuss the “Why” factor of Flutter and “Why it seems to be the next big thing”

In this article, we will be discussing the following points,

• What is Flutter?
• Some features of Flutter
• Trends over the past 1 Year
• Why Flutter?
• Our Personal Experience

So, let’s start with any further delays,

What is Flutter?

Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Yes, that’s right, we can develop applications for android, iOS, web, all with just a single code base, this means, with Flutter, we don’t need to individually create apps for various platforms.
Released in May 2017, it is written using the C, C++, Dart, Skia Graphics Engine. The flutter is the only framework with mobile SDK which provides reactive styles without using any Javascript bridge. It uses Dart, Google’s in house programming language for its functioning.

Some features of Flutter

Let’s have a look at some amazing features of Flutter,

1. Fast Development

Flutter's hot reload helps you quickly and easily experiment, build UIs, add features, and fix bugs faster. You can use a rich set of fully-customizable widgets to build native interfaces in minutes.

2. Expressive and Flexible UI

You can quickly ship features with a focus on native end-user experiences. The layer of Flutter architecture allows for full customization, which results in incredibly fast rendering and expressive and flexible designs.

3. Native Performance

Flutter’s widgets incorporate all critical platform differences such as scrolling, navigation, icons, and fonts, and the Flutter code is compiled to native ARM machine code using Dart's native compilers.

Trends over the past 1 Year

Well, Flutter has grown dramatically over the past year. Many companies, many startups have started opting for Flutter for their development. If you are more of a stats person, below are the recent stats over the past 12 months according to Google Trends .

We can clearly see the shift in the trends! Amazing, right?

Why Flutter?

Well, as of now Flutter seems impressive and awesome, right? Now let’s look at a few reasons why Flutter can be tech stack for your next app 😉

1) Completely Different Cross-Platform Performance

Well, creating cross-platform apps has been a challenge for the developers out there. Try to match the UI/UX and creating identical apps for various platforms is tough. While using React Native has been a kind of relief but the user experience has been degraded since it’s done in JavaScript that has is Just In Time compiled Here comes Flutter! A savior after all. With Flutter, you have an advantage of a single code base that is the “write once” approach and you can create apps with much better User Experience since it is Ahead Of Time compiled. This makes Flutter apps far more efficient and a great choice for cross-platform development.

2) A Super Hot Speed

Well, development with Flutter has been taken to another level with is Fast and Super Hot speed with the help of something called “Hot Reload”. This allows developers to see changes they make to the state of an app in less than one second. While in Android development, you need to run the Gradle build again to see the changes. Well, android app developers know this pain! Flutter makes the development time reduced by 30–40% because of this and changes the whole development experience.

3) Truly Single Code Based

As we know, Flutter requires a single code base for Android and iOS, but you will be surprised to know that Flutter uses a single language, Dart which does the job of both, frontend and backend. As in Android, we need to develop the frontend with XML and later bind it to Java. Dart has been built on a lot of the most popular features of other languages without losing the familiarity of Java or similar languages. Thus, getting hands-on Dart and mastering Dart is quite easy.

4) Smooth Design

Flutter is made with keeping and following the Google material design in mind and thus, it’s easy to create powerful UI experiences quite easily. This helps the development of a smooth user experience just like the native application. Flutter also provides various widgets that help to create smooth and native designs like the ones for iOS.

5) Tons of Packages

Packages play an important role in the lives of developers. Flutter is quite new as of now, but still, you can find tons of packages for the various purposes that will ease your developing process. Flutter developers and community continuously thrive to create amazing packages and try to contribute to all the developers

6) Multiple IDE Support

As a mobile app developer, you must be using Android Studio. And we know how heavy it is and the problems that it can create. While we can use Android Studio for Flutter as well, but the aim of Flutter is to make the development process easier and lighter, thus there is truly no sense in using Android Studio. When coding with Flutter you can choose from a number of Integrated Development Environments out of which one our all-time favorite VS Code. VS Code is lightweight and much faster and has most of the features available in Android Studio and IntelliJ.

7) Crazy Animations

Animations can make or break the experience of an application. While with Flutter, working with animations has never been easier and so awesome. One can create out of the box animations using Flutter that can create some dope animations for your application. Working with animations has been a bit complicated with Android and iOS, but Flutter makes it super easy with various packages and tools that it provides.

These are some of the reasons for Flutter attracting many developers and companies.

Our Personal Experience

Talking about our experience with Flutter, our application, Programming Hero which is an app to learn programming and related stuff is developed using Flutter. We have added various animations and integrated various games to level up the user experience. Talking about the development process, it was quite seamless even though at that time Flutter was fairly new. Our users enjoy our application and love the UI. That itself is the success of using Flutter

Well, that is all about Flutter and surely it can be the “Next Big Thing” for developers and can change the whole game. Wish to learn mobile app development and programming? Try our app Programming Hero, fun was to learn to code.