The Comprehensive Guide to Flutter App Development

With technology creating a long-lasting impact on the app development arena, here’s everything you need to know about Flutter, a UI toolkit from Google to create cross-platform apps.

Let’s start with some basics.

What is Flutter?

Google introduced Flutter as an open-source technology for developing beautiful native apps for Android and iOS. Since then, flutter app development has received consistent upgrades with contemporary widgets, tools, and a comprehensive framework driven by one codebase for both platforms.

Flutter mobile app development SDK gives your developers the capabilities to create and deploy visually intuitive mobile applications. The ease of development it provides makes it one of the popular technologies among developers, as evident from trends on Stack Overflow and GitHub trends.

There are 50K+ Flutter applications on Google Play Store. Even Google uses this toolkit for the Google Home Hub UI and its various Google Assistant modules. Many giant organizations like eBay, Alibaba, etc. are using Flutter to make their web and mobile applications more user-friendly.

What’s more, Flutter: (Quick Facts/Stats)

Now, let’s check out some interesting Flutter facts.

• Flutter is free of cost and customizable
• Backed by an array of rich widgets and UI elements that follow particular guidelines
• Flutter is the 2nd most popular cross-platform mobile app development technology used by developers across the globe, says Statista 2020 survey
• Flutter is developed with a fast and easy-to-learn, object-oriented programming language known as Dart
• Flutter architecture is based on reactive programming and has evolved to compete with React Native
• The technology uses a C++ rendering engine

Key Characteristics of Flutter Application Development

For any business, the platform stability and performance of its custom business apps are of great value. Besides, real-time support and timely updates play a vital role in customer retention and satisfaction. Hire Flutter app developers to leveraging & development a holistic solution for your business with the following.

• Resource Saving: With the compilation of high-end rendering engines and native code, Flutter represents a classic example of resource consumption. Your business lures a simplified development process as the developers don’t need to adjust the user interface to shift it to a platform.
• High Performing: Flutter applications are directly compiled into machine code which successfully eliminates all the errors associated with the interpretation process or intermediate code representations. This makes it a high-performing toolkit among cross-platform technologies of today.
• Productive and Stable: Flutter’s ready-to-use widgets offer exceptional platform stability. Your developers get the privilege of writing codes at a faster rate and being more productive. Its syntax involves less code writing which makes regular upgrades and debugging easier.
• Faster Time to Market: Building apps with Flutter requires less time as compared to creating applications with other frameworks and programming languages. And, as these applications involve faster coding, they enter the market earlier thereby, reducing the time to market.
• Competitive Development: Creating Flutter mobile apps requires fewer man-hours as compared to native development. Flutter offers a more efficient and low-cost development workflow that your developers won’t get while using most of the other cross-platform languages.

How to get started with Flutter?

With Flutter, the approach to development is stimulated by declarative UI writing. Your developers can start with flutter by creating custom widgets and then combine them with the existing ones seamlessly. Moreover, there is a smooth learning curve to have the best custom business apps onboard.

Keeping all this in mind, here’s a lowdown on how to get started with Flutter.

• Be clear about your business as well as development requirements and what type of applications you seek
• Learn and understand what exactly is Dart and Object-Oriented Programming concepts
• Join Gitter chat to connect with people having hands-on experience on Flutter
• Go through GitHub repositories. You can also join Slack and other flutter communities to get a better exposure
• Attend technology conferences, hackathons, and seminars
• Participate in Flutter webinars, online courses, code challenges. Also, go through a lot of Flutter app development tutorials and blogs
• Gain some quality knowledge about development platforms and check your system requirements
• Download Flutter SDK, follow the respective instructions after selecting your operating system
• Install an editor and understand its fundamentals

Top 5 advantages of Using Flutter for mobile app owners

Here’s a list of the top five advantages of using Flutter from an app owner’s perspective.
Let’s have a look.

• Single Codebase: With Flutter, your developers can write a single codebase for your two business apps outlining iOS as well as Android platforms. Having its own set of designs and widgets makes it platform-independent. What’s more interesting is that you can have the same app on two different platforms and easily differentiate those apps.
• Fewer Checks: Having the same apps on two different platforms means fewer checks and testing issues. You can have a faster QA process. For QA experts, testing becomes easier as only one app is to be tested and analyzed. No doubt if your apps carry some unique change then the quality checks are to be made for both platforms accordingly.
• Speedy Code Writing: Flutter helps your developers in creating a faster and dynamic mobile application development environment. It’s Hot Reload facility helps in rapid experimentation, debugging, and efficient addition of features in just a few seconds. It helps in attaining a collaborative relationship between developer and designer.
• Rapid App Development: While scrolling, your business apps won’t show any kinds of cutting or hanging when built with Flutter. Developers get enough room for choosing from an array of widgets with their successful implementation. These ready-to-use widgets help in developing mobile applications rapidly.
• Minimalistic Designs: Flutter helps in creating new widgets in an easy manner. Combining these widgets with the existing ones and even customizing them is another significance of this technology. This helps in bringing the best of the designs to the table alongside offering user-friendly experiences.

Does Flutter have any cons?

As a mobile app owner, you should have recognized all the benefits that Flutter offers with the above. However, there are a few areas that still need tweaks and modifications.

• Third-party Libraries – Being a new technology, Flutter lacks enough third-party assistance. The currently available third-party libraries are limited which proves to be a downside.
• File Size – Though current mobile devices have large storage capacities; it cannot be neglected that the size of native mobile apps developed with Flutter (in MB) is much larger than native Java (in KB).
• Skill Requirement – Flutter is definitely easy to use and can even be learned by non-developers. However, to learn this technology you have to learn and understand the Dart programming language.

Reading all that’s being said till now, if you still think Flutter as your go-to solution to build business mobile apps, let’s go through some points when it should not be your choice:

· Building applications with rare native libraries
· Creating AR/VR apps
· Developing small-sized spontaneous web and mobile apps

Top Characteristics of Flutter as a Cross-platform App Development Framework

Now as you have come across the pros and cons of Flutter, let’s check out some of its significant cross-platform characteristics to count on.

• Rich Widgets: As said earlier, Flutter is backed by rich widgets which need smart utilization to generate the best possible outcomes. Mobile app owners can use various widgets that satisfy their business model and client requirements. Thus, this technology develops cross-platform apps with stylistic and structural elements.
• Google Firebase Support: When backend support is your lookout, you can hire Flutter developers that are supported by Google’s Firebase. Getting this technology to work shall help your business build highly scalable cross-platform applications in no time.
• Great Number of Open-source Package: One of the key characteristics of Flutter is that it comes packed with a wide number of open-source packages supporting faster app development. These packages include Frideos_flutter, Youtube_player, Flutter Ecommerce, etc. Furthermore, as it’s a comprehensive open-source platform, programmers across the world continuously keep adding their works to the library.
• Top Learning Sources: The official Flutter website provides extensive resources for non-programmers, experts, and individuals who are new to its declarative UI. The quality and wide-ranging documentation maintained by a large community make Flutter app development reach every business owner and developer.
• Offers Extensive Developer Experience: Flutter development tools are driven by state-of-the-art IDE support through Visual Studio Code and Android/IntelliJ Studio plugins. Also, building applications with this platform only needs developers to gain a good knowledge about Dart rather than pushing them to be a JavaScript, Swift, or any other programming language, expert.
• Easy Handling: Another characteristic of Flutter is that the Dart programming language observes two compilation modes – just-in-time and ahead-of-time. This enables a hot reload during the development process. Additionally, it’s statically typed which helps mobile app owners to relax and put the development tools to work.

Related read: The Flutter Layout Cheat Sheet: A Must-Have Resource for Developers