Deep Dive into Flutter Mobile App Development: Challenges and Benefits
Flutter is an open-source, cross-platform mobile app development framework that has gained its popularity in recent times due to its amazing features and its latest version update- Flutter 3.3 .
In technical terms, Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit and mobile app SDK developed and launched by Google. Flutter is a portable UI toolkit that allows developers to build visually attractive and fast mobile apps for all platforms — Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, and Fuchsia.
Recently, the number of mobile applications built in Flutter has increased as the developers find it useful due to its cross-platform feature where they don’t need to write the code for multiple platforms — one codebase will work both on iOS and Android platforms.
It has become costly and time-consuming if you opt for a framework where you must write different codes for iOS and Android platforms. Thus, Flutter’s single codebase feature will become an easy-to-go budget-friendly option for every business owner.
Why is Flutter the best for your project?
Being a business owner, you will always be happy to see your development team working on a framework that would build an application consisting of an intuitive UI with smooth animations.
Advantages of Flutter Mobile App Development
- Widgets built for Smooth UI : Flutter is all about widgets. It enables developers to customize widgets as per their requirements and create UIs of an app.
- Single Codebase: Flutter allows the development team to write just a single codebase for all the platforms. The USP of Flutter app development is that it’s not dependent on any platform, as it has its own widgets. This allows the implementation of the same application on various platforms.
- Hot Reload: One of the too-hot-to-handle features of Flutter is Hot Reload. Whenever developers commit any changes in the project code, they can view all the changes in real-time. This lowers the development time by fixing any encountered error immediately, without restarting the whole thing.
- Top Performance: If we compare Flutter with Xamarin and React Native performance, Flutter stands first with 58 fps and a 220-ms launch time. Xamarin has 345 ms with 53 fps, and React Native has 229 ms and 57 fps.
Disadvantages of Flutter App Development
Time to check out the other side of the coin. With great benefits, every framework carries some disadvantages, too and Flutter is not untouched by this fact.
- Emerging Framework: As Flutter is slowly but steadily making it’s mark in the cross-platform framework industry, it will be tough for us to find enough tutorials about its development.
- Limited Packages and Plugins: We received the first stable version of Flutter in 2018, and it has already had more than 26k packages for development which is increasing every day, but yes, at the same time, it is less than React Native and other older frameworks.
- Size of Final App Outcome: As the Flutter app is built with various widgets, so the final app will be a bit bigger in size.
- Little Dart Community: The developer’s community in Dart is much lesser than in JavaScript. This only defines that there are very limited resources available that could help developers to learn Dart.
What’s more about Flutter?
Flutter is best for creating a customized application experience. Every time again and again it has been shown that award-winning applications (MWC’s Glomo Awards, TIME’s Best Apps of the Year and the Webby Awards Mobile Apps) focus on delivering beautiful custom experiences rather than the pixel-perfect native iOS/Android look — and Flutter delivers on this.
Still confused about whether to opt for Flutter for your mobile application development project?
This article will help you in making the perfect decision.
