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Organizations are developing cross-platform apps using frameworks like React Native, Xamarin, and AngularJS in recent years. Despite this, cross-platform development remains a challenge. Many times, despite best efforts, the user experience simply falls short of that of native apps.
In recent years, a new player entered the game – Google Flutter. The interest in Flutter from developers, clients, and organizations has grown steadily over the past few times.
Out of one-third of mobile developers that use cross-platform frameworks for mobile app development, Flutter is the most popular cross-platform mobile framework used by global developers.
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Additionally, Flutter’s integration with Firebase makes it even easier to create powerful, dynamic applications. As the industry continues to evolve, it is likely that Flutter will become even more popular with businesses looking to create mobile applications in 2023.
Flutter – A Brief Background
Flutter is an open-source software development kit (SDK) developed by Google that has helped developers build high-performance web applications with effective UI for cross-platforms.
It is a layered system that comprises a framework, engine, and platform-specific embedders. It uses a modern and reactive framework written in Goggle’s Dart language for the development of applications. Flutter has the Skia library as the backbone for graphics capabilities with platform-specific embedder written in C/C++/Java.
The central idea to design this toolkit is to enable developers to administer high-performance applications that feel natural on different platforms, besides sharing as much code as possible.
Several high-level effective features are implemented as packages.
Many mobile app development companies now prefer Flutter for cross-platform app development.
So let us straightaway discuss the attributes that make Flutter Development so popular!
Flutter Features for Cross-Platform Mobile Development
- Dedication for mobile
- Delivering UI consistency over all platforms
- Hot Reload to reduce code development time
- Improved time-to-market speed
- Cognate with native
- Customizing any complexity
- Writes custom platform-specific code
- Own high-performance rendering engine
- Compliant for Fuchsia
1) Dedication for Mobile
Flutter promptly concentrates on the mobile-only features, without agonizing about the web and other platforms. In fact, it is the first ever mobile-only cross-platform framework used for mobile app development. Together, it enables the creation of customized experiences for iOS and Android users without any compromise and with fewer resources.
2) Delivering UI Consistency Over All Platforms
Flutter is an exclusive framework used by any Flutter app development company that allows the sharing of UI code and UI itself. Largely, the framework relying on platform-specific components for rendering prompts the demand for a property mapping layer for the platform widget along with framework widget data synchronization. Contrarily, Flutter does not require any platform-specific UI components to deliver its UI. It just shows the application UI a canvas to fall back on. Using Flutter for cross-platform mobile app development shares the UI and business logic to save surplus time and effort of the developer.
3) Hot Reload to Reduce Code Development Time
Flutter’s hot-reload feature helps visualize the changes made in real-time. While the changes do not even alter the prevailing application state. This is one fair reason for increased development speed while using flutter app development services. This hot-reload feature works by injecting updated source code files into the running Dart Virtual Machine helps to quickly and easily experiment, build UIs, add features, and fix bugs.
Moreover, flutter provides a wide range of accessible widgets with an extensive capability to create complex customized widgets. Where other frameworks separate the view controllers, layouts, and other properties, Flutter provides a unified object model with these widgets.
4) Improved Time-to-Market Speed
It is quite simple to understand that Flutter for cross-platform app development consumes a minimum of two times lesser man-hours in comparison to separate development for android and iOS. Here, any 2D- based UI can be implemented without interacting with the native application counterpart. Even the transition between various UI states is taken care of by Flutter, as the developer just needs to describe the current UI state. All these parameters make it very easy in improving the time-to-market speed for the mobile app developed by Flutter.
5) Analogous to Native
Better UX is crucial for any mobile app development. And the native app showcases outstanding performance when it comes to UX. Likewise, Flutter application performances are proclaimed indistinguishable from the native apps, at times even better in complex UI animations. This is speculated, as Flutter does not rely on any intermediate code representations or interpretations. With Flutter, the application is built directly into the machine code, which rules out any performance bugs in the interpretation process.
6) Customizing Any Complexity
Customizing UI has never been easy for any cross-platform mobile app development. Flutter provides the opportunity to customize anything visible over a screen, no matter its complexity. Be it the shared transition elements, clipping, or even transformation, Flutter does it all. It is one such cross-platform development that allows the customization process to be very flexible and versatile. Also, it comes with pre-packed implicit animations to suit your basic animation needs, that too with the aptness to customize it. Moreover, you can even create animations where the motion and gestures can be controlled by you rather than the framework. This comes under explicit animations by Flutter.
7) Writes Custom Platform-Specific Code
Flutter as an application, provide various ready-to-use plugins, endorsed by Google. All these plugins contribute to advanced OS-level features like Bluetooth communication, permission handling, collecting sensor data, credentials handling, and many others. However, the non-availability of any feature as a plugin can be easily compensated by the platform channels (that use standard message codecs) that establish communication between platform native code and Dart.
8) Own High-Performance Rendering Engine
Everything discussed here and many other such features are all possible on the strength of a high-performance cross-platform rendering engine. Flutter uses Skia, an open-source 2D graphics library, as the graphics engine along with Google Chrome, Chrome OS, Android, Mozilla Firefox, and Firefox OS. This library is sponsored and managed by Google, however, it is available to anyone under BSD Free Software License. And because of its ubiquitous behavior, Flutter UI can be easily launched over any platform, virtually.
9) Compliant for Fuchsia
Fuchsia is no longer a covert mission. Brought to all by Google, Fuchsia is another operating system for chrome and mobile, that uses the Skia engine to build the UI component and Dart language for its development. The Flutter cross-platform software development kit allows the installation of parts of Fuchsia on Android devices. As Flutter is built keeping Fuchsia in mind, users will have a smooth transition from Android. It is quite relevant to say that if Google plans Fuchsia for the future, Flutter is definitely enduring the future.
Wrap Up
Flutter is a powerful open UI toolkit for building stunning experiences on any device. We can conclude four salient characteristics of Flutter that makes it a unique platform for everybody to make a native mobile application experience – It is Beautiful, Productive, Fast, and Open.
Identically, Ace Infoway also believes in making any digital experience as beautiful, productive, fast, and reliable as it can get. If you’re looking for an experienced Flutter app development company in the USA, Our Flutter mobile app developers provide services to meet your unique project requirements.
If you are looking for an experienced Flutter app development company in the USA, Our Flutter developers provide services tailored to meet your unique project requirements.
Team up with us for easy integration with your technical team or work as an offshore business partner.