With the continuing proliferation in mobile devices, there is an upsurge of mobile app development trends over the past few years.
According to mobile app statistics collected by buildfire,
- Google Play Store has 2.8 million apps and the Apple App Store has 2.2 million apps available for download.
- Mobile apps are the source of 57% of all digital media usage.
- By 2020, experts expect Mobile apps to generate a revenue of $189 billion.
These figures show the popularity of mobile apps among users. To be in tandem with the fast-growing needs of users, industry geeks are getting inclined to adopting advanced technologies that can deliver full native performance, high-quality performance, flexible UI, and faster development.
Moreover, with the goal to save time and avoid platform issues, developers of mobile app development companies have started using the cross-platform frameworks which facilitates them to leverage app features anytime using a single code base.
When we talk about providing users with native applications experience and cross-platform app development, Facebook’s React Native and Google’s Flutter stand as strong competitors.
If you are perplexing between which framework to choose for your upcoming assignment, this article covers everything to help you discover what is Google Flutter framework, its captivating features, and how can it help you create robust mobile apps.
Let’s get started.
What is Google Flutter?
“ A Portable UI Framework for mobile, expanding functionality to Web, Embedded, and Desktop to achieve “write once, run anywhere” dream.
Google says Flutter is a free and open-source mobile app software development kit (SDK) used for making beautiful, high-fidelity, fast, and natively-compiled cross-platform applications from a single codebase.
Flutter has a thin layer of C/C++ code, yet, most of its systems are implemented in a client-optimized programming language called Dart which developers can approach read, replace, or remove.
Dart was chosen as a language because it can be compiled:
- AOT (ahead-of-time)
- JIT (just-in-time).
As it provides great control over the system, this makes Google Flutter framework a powerful development technology.
Brands like Google Ads, Alibaba, Hamilton Musical, and Abbey Road Studio used Flutter to create beautiful app experiences over android and iOS.
On one side where it has come up as technological advancement ruling the app development industry, doing mobile
In a nutshell, Flutter is a way forward for mobile app development.
Key Features Of Google Flutter
Owing to its impressive features, the Google Flutter framework is gaining momentum at a fast pace. Let’s throw some light on its essential features next.
- Single-code based
The most important feature of Flutter is it allows programmers to create reactive styles without involving any Javascript bridge. Besides this, Flutter does not even use other tech stacks like HTML, C++, Swift, and more. It rather focuses on a single code that is used to produce IOS and Android app.
- Cross-Platform
An interesting feature that makes Flutter unique as compared to other frameworks or libraries is that it has its own UI system which provides incredible capabilities.
Does, in any instance, your mobile app development team think of using an Android interface on an iOS app or wish for a unique interface that works the same for both android and iOS?
Well, Flutter is the answer.
- Performance-driven & Faster Startup Speed
Flutter takes an upper edge in terms of widgets too. It uses graphics engine Skia to perform all UI rendering on the application side.
Since Dart is written into native code, instead of accessing the OEM widget code, Flutter uses its own widgets. The makers of Flutter provided widgets that are a lookalike of the stock OEM widgets. This assures less intervention between the platform and the app.
Because Google Flutter framework is effective to provide reactive views without requiring a JavaScript bridge, this minimizes any performance issues and provides fast app startup times.
- No WYSIWYG editor
Flutter provides such easy functionality that once developers finish with the code, it renders on the screen and it refreshes easily. It does not try to dump the code down by drag and drop or XML interface.
What’s new in Flutter?
On Sep 19th, 2019, the latest version 1.9 of Flutter became live which includes advanced features.
- Besides so many advantages, Flutter earlier had a big disadvantage that mobile app developers can’t reuse code on the web, for a progressive web app, or for web apps as it is in Dart which is committed fully to the app development. But with the launch of Flutter 1.9, the code compatibility feature allows developers to use it for the web as well. It can be now rendered using regular web technologies such as CSS, Javascript, and HTML.
- This version comprises New Material widgets. Material is well-known open-source design systems exhibiting a flexible set of building blocks for implementing interactive user experiences across multiple platforms.
- It also includes added Worldwide language support for 24 new languages, from Afrikaans to Zulu.
- With Flutter 1.9, Dart 2.5 is also released, comprising a pre-release of Foreign Function Interface (FFI) support which provides native extensions. This enables Dart to call into code written in C.
- Flutter 1.9 is constructed to work well with iOS 13 and macOS Catalina.
- Many toolchain improvements are included in the newer version of Google Flutter framework.
Wrapping It Up
Building apps in Flutter is undoubtedly a great experience however, if you are building apps that require device-specific functions then it is not a great option.
Flutter enables app developers to reap gains of a top-level unified widget concept without the need to sacrifice the ability of diving into lower layers. It provides a highly productive, highly customized apps, unified experience without involving huge testing efforts as developers usually incorporate in app development.
With over 2k apps running on Flutter, it has managed to gain enough popularity among huge brands. So, are you into adopting Flutter for your next-gen beautiful apps?
What’s your take on Flutter app development? Do share your views in comments.
