Why should I choose Flutter for mobile app development?

Today every business is going mobile due to the “mobile-first” approach and use on demand app development service as well. On the same note, every business needs to take an efficient decision with regard to their choice of mobile technology. In this constantly advancing and consistently experimenting world of technology, staying updated is the key. This type of cross platform is a boon for on demand service app development companies. Let's Talk about Flutter now.....

Flutter uses the Google-developed Dart language. If you’ve used Java before, you’ll be fairly familiar with the syntax of Dart as they are quite similar. Besides the syntax, Dart is a fairly different language.

Developing mobile apps can take a lot of time considering you need to use a different codebase for Android and iOS. That is unless you use an SDK like Flutter, where you have a single codebase that allows you to build your app for both operating systems. Not only that, but you can run them completely natively. This means things such as scrolling and navigation, to name a few, act just like they should for the OS being used.

To keep with the theme of simplicity, as long as you have a device or simulator running, Flutter makes building and running your app for testing as simple as clicking a button.

UI development is one of those things that I almost never look forward to. I’m more of a backend developer, so when it comes to working on something that is heavily dependent on it, I want something simple. This is where Flutter shines in my eyes.

UI is created by combining different widgets together and modifying them to fit the look of your app. You have near full control over how these widgets display, so you’ll always end up with exactly what you’re looking for. For laying out the UI, you have widgets such as Row, Column, and Container. For content, you have widgets like Text and RaisedButton. This is only a few of the widgets Flutter offers, there are a lot more. Using these widgets, we can build a very simple UI.

No platform is perfect and sometimes the lack of a particular feature can be a dealbreaker. Here are ones I personally think should be considered before you think of switching:

Flutter is still in Beta:

Being in Beta, stability isn’t completely guaranteed and a few bugs should be expected here and there. Some functionality developers usually take for granted may not exist on the platform.

Lack of packages:

There are not as many packages written for Dart meaning you might have to write code for something you would usually do with a simple library or package. This is not a minor issue and should be treated with caution.

No layout editor:

Unlike in XML, there is no drag-and-drop interface available which could be a deal-breaker to some. Flutter does provide Flutter Outline to visualise the component tree better but it’s not as useful as actually looking at a generated screen.

Limited StackOverFlow support:

Because Flutter is new, support isn’t as extensive as normal Android, but the Flutter team is quite active on Stack Overflow, so all hope isn’t lost.

The most significant thing about Flutter is that it has helped in bridging the gap between an app designer and developer by reducing the time required to apply interface and animation changes. Moreover, not only apps, now the developers can write the same code for developing apps for web browsers too with the launch of prototype Hummingbird. Releasing apps on multiple platforms has been made easier by Flutter like never before.