Why should I think about switching to Flutter? If you are asking this question or a similar one, then this article is written specifically for you.
Choosing Flutter is a decision that will certainly benefit your company because of the fact that this SDK (Software Development Kit) is highly productive, helps to reduce time, and saves budget. In this article, you will learn the particular details about how Flutter may solve the most popular development problems, some of which you must have faced. In case you are looking for a team of professionals, you may make use of Flutter development services from OTAKOYI.
What is Flutter?
The real challenge of modern application development is that your application usually has to target multiple platforms. For instance, when you create a mobile application, it is better to make it for both the most popular operating systems, iOS, and Android. However, if you use the native development approach, you will have to create two separate applications, which means that you will have to hire two teams for each of the platforms.
Such a situation has a better solution if you choose cross-platform development. In this case, you create only one app that works for both iOS and Android. Flutter is a cross-platform SDK, which means that it is one of those tools that will help you avoid spending excessive funds on the second team. As a matter of fact, the decision to choose the cross-platform approach has a lot of other benefits, and Flutter in particular is the best choice among all the cross-platform frameworks and SDKs.
The benefits of Flutter
The fact is that there are a lot of good frameworks that generally do the same job as Flutter. However, if you look into details, Flutter is a really outstanding one. So, let us look at its advantages.
Developer experience and development speed
There is a popular problem in software development that is called compilation. This process may not take a lot of time when the app is small, but it has to be performed whenever there is the slightest change in the code. Thus, due to the repetitiveness, it takes a lot of time when the whole development process is concerned.
This problem is solved by the Hot Reload function that allows a developer to implement any changes to the code on the fly. This feature is not unique for Flutter because a lot of frameworks also have it. However, this is not the only thing that makes coding on Flutter so quick and effortless.
Flutter also has widgets. They are the elements that represent the UI, and Flutter has a lot of standard ones that look and act like native UI elements. Therefore, you can save a lot of time, which otherwise had to be spent on the creation of the basic standard elements. Moreover, these widgets can be customized as well as created from scratch.
Time-to-marked speed and reduced costs
As it was mentioned above, the development process with Flutter is approximately twice as fast compared to native. This is a good opportunity for a quick release of your MVP or a startup, in which case the speed is critical to the success.
Such an approach also affects the budget because it saves money on the whole team of developers. As a consequence, you will have less code, and therefore, less mistakes and bugs. Thus, it also saves money on quality assurance specialists. What is more, because of widgets that represent the standard UI elements of the platforms, you can also reduce the amount of work your designers will have to do, which also means saving money.
High performance
You can never provide users with a good UX if your app lags or has a lot of bugs. Therefore, the issue of performance is a crucial one whenever your app is concerned. In the case of Flutter, its applications work so well that they are indistinguishable from native ones. Furthermore, when the UI of your Flutter app becomes complicated it will still remain highly productive, which is not always the case even for a native app. It is due to ahead-of-time compilation, a procedure that builds an app directly into the machine code. In plain English, it translates high-level Flutter code into ones and zeros.
Custom UI
Flutter is like Lego for your future app, especially when the UI is concerned. You can create and customize anything regarding the interface. What is more, the process of UI development on Flutter is easy and flexible. You can manipulate colors, shapes, shadows, animations, perform clipping or transformations without additional workload.
Everything above would be impossible without Flutter’s own rendering engine. It is called Skia, and it allows implementing the UI of any complexity on different platforms, even beyond mobile.
Beyond mobile
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Without a doubt, the most important advantage of Flutter is that you develop an app on a single codebase, and as a result, you get two applications, one for iOS, and another for Android. In fact, since Flutter was updated in March 2021, you can get more than two applications. The thing is that Flutter 2.0 now also supports such platforms as Linux, Windows, macOS, and the web. Thus, you can develop applications for six different platforms at a time.
Conclusions
Flutter is definitely a must-try software development kit in 2021-2022. This SDK is already better than all the other ones as well as it continues to grow with the new functions added and new platforms supported.
The most important advantage of Flutter is a single codebase, due to which you spend the time needed to develop one application, but as a result, you can receive up to six. This also affects the cost of development. Moreover, it is quite easy to mimic native UI or create your own design. Together with high productivity, all of these benefits become possibilities for your business to achieve success quickly and effortlessly.