Mobile users expect their apps to have beautiful designs, smooth animations, and great performances. To deliver on this, developers need to create a few features faster than ever without compromising on quality or performance. Thus, Google promises this quality or performance with Flutter. Before diving deep into Flutter, the first one should know, what it is.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit created by Google which is used to develop cross-platform applications for Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows, Google Fuchsia, Web platform, and the web from a single codebase. It provides a simple, powerful, efficient, and easy to understand SDK to write a mobile application in Google’s language, Dart.
The first version of Flutter was known by the codename “Sky” and ran on the Android operating system which was unveiled at the 2015 Dart developer summit with the stated intent of being able to render consistently at 120 frames per second. During the keynote of Google Developer Days in Shanghai in September 2018, Google announced Flutter Release Preview 2, which is the last big release before Flutter 1.0. On December 4th of that year, Flutter 1.0 was released at the Flutter Live event, denoting the first “stable” version of the Framework. On December 11, 2019, Flutter 1.12 was released at the Flutter Interactive event.
Flutter apps are compiled directly to machine code, whether Intel x64 or ARM instructions or to JavaScript if targeting the web at the time of release and the framework is open-source, with a permissive BSD license. It also has a thriving ecosystem of third-party packages that supplement the core library functionality.
Why Flutter is better?
Flutter is Google’s mobile UI framework that provides a fast and expressive way for developers to build native apps on both iOS and Android. The main reason for the same is that the apps and interfaces made with Flutter are built from a single codebase, compiled directly to native arm code, use the GPU, and can access platform APIs and services.
Now, coming to the question that why one should switch to Flutter. Flutter is engineered for high developer velocity and stateful hot reload allows you to change your code and see it come to life in less than a second, without losing the state of the app. Flutter also ships with a rich set of customizable widgets, all built from our modern reactive framework. Plus, flutter integrates with popular development tools, which means one can get started quickly with the editor or IDE they already know and are comfortable with.
Flutter moves the widgets, rendering, animation, and gestures into the framework, to give the developer complete control over every pixel on the screen which means one has the flexibility to build custom designs. Flutter apps follow platform conventions and interface details, such as scrolling, navigation, icons, fonts, and more which is the reason the apps built with flutter are featured on both the App Store and Google Play Store. The newly released versions of Flutter apps target Android and iOS and are compiled with an ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation which gives better performance.
Flutter is great for mobile developers whether experienced or new. If someone is new to mobile, flutter gives them a fast, fun, and modern way to deliver native apps. And if someone is an experienced mobile developer, they can add flutter to your existing workflows and tools to build new expressive UIs.
Flutter is free and open-source and used by developers and organizations around the world, including enterprises, agencies, and startups.