Introduction

As digitization has taken over the business, education, entertainment, health, fintech, and commerce sectors, it has led to a huge surge in the need for mobile apps, which are an essential part of our lives now

The pandemic has further digitally transformed many services. In 2020 alone, app development revenues amounted to $580 billion.

Even within app development, cross-platform apps are the future. According to a survey conducted by Jet Brains, 43% of app developers are involved in cross-platform app development.

Businesses are looking to deploy their apps across multiple devices, which would save them time, and costs and reduce the need of assigning different teams to different platforms.

This is where Flutter has provided a powerful solution to these businesses. More than 2 million app developers have been utilizing Flutter’s Software Development Kit since 2018 for developing not only consumer apps but also enterprise applications.

App development continues to evolve with its innovation every day. Hence app developers are always looking for simpler, faster, and cheaper ways to get their products to market.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is Google’s portable, free and open-source Software Development Kit (SDK) and includes widgets and tools.

Flutter enables cross-platform app development. It gives developers an easy way to build and deploy visually appealing, natively-compiled mobile (both Android and iOS), web, and desktop using the same codebase.

A survey conducted by Statista revealed that Flutter has recently surpassed React Native to become the number one mobile app development framework.

Let's take a look at some advantages that Flutter promises for App development

A Platform Agnostic Toolkit

Any developer intending to launch a mobile app knows the importance of deploying it on both Android and iOS devices. As of 2022, Android maintains a firm hold on the mobile market with a 71% market share, whereas iOS has a 29% share in the mobile market.

Building a single native application (Android or iOS) neglects a large market chunk and inhibits the app’s potential business success. However, developing separate native applications is a time-consuming and expensive process. 

Flutter simplified cross-platform development. Rather than creating separate code for each platform, developers can deploy Flutter’s single codebase across multiple platforms including Android, iOS, Web, Desktop, MacOS and Linux.

Moreover, unlike React Native, Flutter-built user interfaces are also platform-agnostic because Skia, Flutter’s rendering engine does not require any platform-specific UI components and works across all devices.

Dart Advantage

Flutter is based on Dart language, a general-purpose object-oriented programming language. The latest version Dart 2.17 was released at the recently concluded Google I/O. It is a modern object-oriented language this is very easy for developers familiar with C++, Python, or Java since these languages share similar syntax. 

Flutter is also ideal for new developers with less experience. Thanks to Flutter’s dynamic widget library, developers do not have to write detailed code. In fact, there are no code tools like ‘Flutter Flow’ that allows you to build apps without writing any code. 

Hot reloading’ (faster development) means that developers can make changes to the code on the go and it will take only milliseconds for the changes to display. This makes bug resolution and experimentation easier.

Cross-platform Advantage: Manage Your Resources Smartly

Flutter allows your app development teams to work in cohesion. When building apps natively, you would need separate teams working on Android and iOS. However, with Flutter, you do not need segregated teams for both platforms as developers can build apps using the codebase. This allows you to organize your teams around app features instead of platforms. 

The tooling around Flutter is top-notch, adding another layer of productivity compared to other native technologies. With a sprawling ecosystem, developers can find high-quality open source tools from the community and support from well-known brands like Canonical and Microsoft.

Since you can deploy the same code across multiple platforms, you do not need to write tests separately thus saving you around 50% testing time.

Increased transparency

Flutter is an extremely stable and transparent framework owing to it being open-source, which means that you can see the source code and updates. Whenever you face any bug/glitches with Flutter, you can open an issue on Github’s repository, which the Flutter team will be very proactive in responding to. If the bug is with the framework itself, Flutter will release an updated version of the toolkit to address those issues. 

You can check out our recent piece on the recently released Flutter 3.0.2 and the issues it resolved. Also, at the annual Google I/O conference, the Flutter team provides annual updates, strategy, and a clear roadmap of Flutter’s track.

The Flutter developers community is global and very close-knit, which passionately contributes to creating open-source packages, glitch updates, and resolving issues faced by fellow developers. Learning from other developers, and surfing through scores of helpful open-source packages on pub.dev allows developers to polish their app development skills.

‍Flutter is continually transforming

Flutter’s release was announced in 2017 and there was an air of uncertainty regarding its future, considering the prevalence of other popular cross-platform frameworks. However, within five years, Flutter has proved itself to be the leading toolkit, boasting over 1 million apps built around it.

At this year’s I/O, Flutter featured alongside premium Google Products like Android and Chrome, which is indicative of not only Google’s increasing focus on it but also the popularity and success that Flutter has enjoyed, emerging as the tech giant’s premier product.

Flutter 1.0 was released in December 2018, which supported only Android and iOS devices. Flutter 2.0, released in March 2021, brought in a set of changes including Web Support across all platforms, Desktop Support, Memory Allocation tools, and Sound Null Safety for Dart.

In May 2022, the release of Flutter 3.0 and Dart 2.17 was announced simultaneously. These updates included Desktop Support for macOS and Linux, making Flutter available across six platforms:

• iOS

• Android

• Windows

• macOS

• Linux

• Web

Some other additions to the Flutter framework included Material Design 3, International Text Input Support, Foldable Phone Support, Casual Games Toolkit, and Increased Firebase backend support.

Excellent User Experience

Flutter is ideal for creating visually appealing mobile app interfaces and a great user experience. Creating UIs from the most basic to more complex interfaces with multiple components is almost effortless with Flutter. Thanks to having its own set of custom widgets, rendered and managed by the framework’s graphics engine, you can customize and create your own widgets.

Flutter, unlike React Native, does not require bridges between code and native elements and can be compiled directly into native code. This reduces processing times and makes the app faster. The Skia Graphics Library smoothly also delivers 60 frames per second.