
The 21st Century requires your business to be present on every platform. And that too, easily. According to a Hootsuite survey, 92% of mobile users use social media and other apps, and only 8% of them spend time on web browsers. This highlights how important it is for your business to have a cross-platform app. This is where Flutter comes into the picture. It’s a framework that allows you to create apps for multiple platforms with a single codebase. So how is it different from its competitors and why are we calling it the future of app development?
Everything in this article.
What is Flutter and what are the popular apps made with it?
Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit developed by Google. It is used to create cross-platform apps (Android, iOS, Web and Desktop) from a single codebase. It was released in May 2017 to make multi-platform app development easy and cost-effective. A few popular apps created using Flutter are Alibaba, eBay, Dream11, Google Ads, BMW, etc.
How is Flutter different from another very popular framework, React Native?
Flutter and React Native are highly different. React Native works on the programming language JavaScript whereas Flutter works on the language Dart, which is comparatively new. In React Native, you have to create the custom components yourself based on the user experience you want to provide. This increases your reliance on third party's dev kits. On the other hand, Flutter comes with pre-built components which you can embed in your design and save time.
What are the five top benefits of Flutter over other tools?
When it comes to the benefits of using Flutter, it’s a long list. However, here we will lay down the most significant one's for you-
- Cross-Platform App Development: The most fantastic thing about Flutter app development is that it allows you to create multi-platform apps with a single codebase. Due to this, your time and resources that would have otherwise gone into developing native apps for each platform are saved and you can move on to the next important thing on your plan.
- Fast testing: Flutter comes with a really useful feature called Hot Reload. With this, you can test the changes you’ve made in the code in real-time without restarting the app. This gives the opportunity to experiment more with the code and fix bugs quickly.
- A wide array of widgets: Flutter’s material design widgets make it super easy to develop apps for multiple platforms. These widgets are designed in adherence to the guidelines of Android as well as the Cupertino Style of Apple. So, by employing these, you can easily create a custom user interface for a particular platform with the least amount of effort.
- A growing community: In such a short time, the Flutter community has grown substantially. According to JetBrains 2021 State of Developer Ecosystem Survey, it is the most popular cross-platform framework in the world. You can join the Flutter community through this link- Flutter - Build apps for any screen. Weekly Flutter Hackathons are organized on the YouTube channel to deliver more relevant information to the developers.
Conclusion
The business of today is both offline and online. In the digital world, you need to be present across multiple platforms. Here, a framework such as Flutter can prove to be a blessing for you. It can create a cross-platform app for your business in less time and minimal effort. It is also a cost-effective solution as you won’t have to develop separate native apps for each platform. Compared to its competitors, its hot reload feature and material design widgets make it stand out. With all these benefits, Flutter is undoubtedly the future of app development.






