How Flutter is different from other Frameworks

 

Flutter is Google's UI portable toolkit for creating better, natively compiled mobile, web, and desktop applications from a single codebase. Developing cross-platform mobile applications in iOS and Android is better in Flutter. Flutter works with the existing code. Businesses worldwide and developers use this code as free and open source. Flutter aims to make development more accessible, fast, and productive as soon as possible with a good development team.

To ensure Flutter will work better than the other frameworks, hot reload, excellent performance, a vast widget catalog, and a solid community contribute to meeting that objective on time.

On December 4, 2018, Flutter 1.0 was released at the Flutter Live event, indicating this framework's first stable version. Flutter 1.12 was released at the Flutter Interactive event on December 11, 2019.

On May 6, 2020, the Dart software development kit (SDK) version 2.8 and Flutter 1.17.0 were released, adding support for the Metal API, which improves performance on iOS devices by approximately 60%, and new Material widgets and network tracking development tools. On March 3, 2021, Google released Flutter 2 during an online Flutter Engage event.

To know better, let's see the various benefits and drawbacks of Flutter App Development.

Benefits of Flutter App Development

Flutter offers a wide range of benefits for businesses and developers, such as:

• Cross-platform mobile app development frameworks like Flutter provides excellent services and high quality at reasonable costs.
• Mobile app development platform like Flutter offers superb usability and speed.
• Development goes faster when the same principle code is used for iOS and Android applications. Fluter uses the same existing code.
• While developing mobile apps with Flutter, the best thing is that its singular codebase speeds up time-to-market while significantly cutting mobile app development costs.
• A bridge typically causes performance issues; Flutter apps do not need a bridge to interact with native components.
• Flutter app performance is simple, better for developers, and equivalent to native real-time applications.
• This mobile app development framework comes with a "hot reload" functionality that favors mobile app developers to modify their code on simulators, emulators, or real devices and see immediate changes in real time. While the app is running, the revised code is reloaded immediately.
• No restart is required for the app. Hot fills simplify building UIs, adding features, and fixing bugs more than ever.

Drawbacks of Flutter App Development

Flutter offers a lot of positives, but in some cases, this framework has a few drawbacks as well, such as:

React Native and Xamarin are older than the Flutter framework, offering a much more extensive selection. At the same time, Flutter offers many plugins and UI components, So it depends on the project goals which one is better to choose.

The programming language used by Flutter is known as Dart. Dart is less popular than other languages, but Flutter developers mainly use this. Developers are often more likely to consider languages such as Java or Kotlin.

Flutter is Google's UI portable, and Android developers are typically more interested in Flutter than iOS developers. So, a few components are only available for iOS or Android, but not for both. These components more often support Androids.

Flutter uses the programming language Dart, created by Google in 2011. Dart's syntax is similar to JavaScript. One can use a single programming language and codebase to develop Android and iOS with Flutter. Flutter consists of two parts: An SDK and a Framework. SDK ( Software development kit) is a collection of tools that helps you develop your applications.

Let's discuss various aspects that differentiate Flutter from other frameworks.

Fast development

Flutter has Hot Reload and a single codebase, which helps develop a cross-platform app that provides a native base performance to your app in less time. Flutter's Hot Reload feature gives it an advantage over other frameworks. With a single click, developers can apply the new changes. The Hot Reload feature compares previous code and the changes and involves only the latest changes.

Accuracy

Android Studio supports turning Java into Kotlin code, but the 'translation' is only sometimes 100% accurate. Flutter makes the task more manageable with numerous search options and a universal language.

Global community support

Flutter boasts a large community of developers from around the globe. They constantly support creating new features and fixing bugs in the framework, thus catalyzing a highly sophisticated framework.

Easy to learn

Flutter allows developers to build native mobile applications without accessing OEM widgets or using much code. Besides Flutter's appealing user interface, it makes the mobile app creation process straightforward.

Cost and time deductive

A significant factor in contributing to the fast-growing popularity of Flutter is that it saves time and cost induced while developing an app, thus speeding up the project's profitability. Some other advantages of Flutter over Ionic are that Flutter offers a 2D rendering engine and framework, provides easy prototyping, and has a single codebase and readymade widgets. This saves time and money spent on prototyping the product as there is no dependence on third-party tools for rendering.

Easy customization

With Flutter, it's all about the widgets. With an extensive widget library, any customization becomes manageable. It's fast to update and manage applications. Your developers must develop a single codebase that will work for iOS and Android.

The product prototype

One of the most time-consuming factors while developing a product is there back and forth between designers, clients, and the rest of the teams. With reviews conducted during every stage of product development, the design team has to put in extra labor to make a prototype and then include changes. This task becomes quite tedious and ‌leads to a lack of clarity. With Flutter, the pain of building a prototype is handled as the product becomes the prototype. Any changes the client requests can be made within no time and at any development phase.

Team management

As Flutter enables developers to create apps for Android and iOS systems simultaneously, it reduces the workforce required to monitor product development. One team can overlook the entire development process.

Better Animations

We are already familiar with the fact that React Native uses JavaScript. One thing to note is that even though it's a popular coding language, it is a declarative programming language, whereas Dart is more imperative. This makes Dart less readable for humans than Java, but on the other hand, it gives Dart an added advantage when creating animations. Animations created using Dart are smoother and have a higher frame rate.

Increased productivity

Using the same codebase for iOS and Android saves both time and resources. Flutter's native widgets also minimize time spent on testing by ensuring there are little to no compatibility issues with different OS versions.

Third-party dependence

Flutter has automation tools and instructions to aid app deployment, whereas React Native release automation and deployment depend on your developer's skills and third-party tools.

Dynamic UI

One can build an expressive UI (user interface) with Flutter's built-in beautiful material design and Cupertino (iOS-flavor) widgets. One also gets rich motion APIs, smooth, natural scrolling, and platform awareness. Its built-in feature helps in fast development with a fully customizable widget that can be reused if one requires further customization. The layered architecture allows developers to control every pixel, thus empowering them to make changes quickly and get into the intricate details of the design. Flutter doesn't rely on native UI components to render. It uses the inbuilt "Skia Rendering Engine," thus saving much time.

Superior Designs

Though both are products of the same parent company, Google, Android studio uses Java, whereas Flutter uses Dart, making it much faster. Android Studio has been known for its sleek designs, but it is hard to notice the difference between Flutter's recent development. Flutter's UI is pixel-perfect, whereas, with Android Studio, one has to rely on external tools to build complex UIs. Thus, the app-to-market time is considerably reduced, with Flutter rendering more profit.

Conclusion

Almost all cross-platform application development frameworks focus on the easiness of development. We should appreciate the Flutter team because they considered the performance while exposing a developer-friendly API. All these problems with rendering, somewhat bloated binaries, and lack of plugins are temporary — and can be solved. Give Flutter some time to show its power. Perhaps Flutter may implement a better user experience than all existing platform-specific applications.

The Flutter framework presents exciting opportunities for mobile app developers and businesses alike. Building iOS and Android applications with the same codebase on a user-friendly interface makes mobile app development fast and cost-effective. Combined with "Perfecto," organizations can release high-quality Flutter applications quickly and easily.

To know more about Flutter testing capabilities for business growth and receive your free quote for any queries related to UI/UX, mobile app development, MVP development, etc., connect with Quokka Labs experts soon.