What is Flutter and why is it all the rage right now?
It was React Native. And now a strong contender has grown in popularity in the competition for world’s most powerful and intuitive framework for designing apps.
Flutter has been around since 2015 and remained in beta stages until its official release in 2018 and since then the buzz around Flutter has been an immense explosion of love and it continues to be adopted by more companies and individuals around the world.
Flutter is adored for its use of widgets, developers can design their own but Flutter comes built in with tons of useful widgets like a button or a menu and many more. Flutter also provides reactive style views and Dart and compiles it ahead of time to into the native code. This helps boost the apps startup time substantially. Flutter is also the only mobile SDK that offers reactive style views without the need for a Javascript Bridge.
Flutters Best Foot Forward
Flutter is a cross-platform development tool. Developers use the same code base to design both Android and iOS apps. This saves immense amounts of time for developers. It also offers excellent performance, thanks to using the Dart programming language which compiles into native code. It uses its own widgets and because it does there is less communication between the app and the platform. Both of these result in faster app start times and fewer performance issues in general.
Flutter also has Hot Reload, this allows instant viewing of the changes applied to the code on emulators, simulators and hardware. This saves time for developers by not having to refresh every time a change is entered.
Speaking of widgets, this makes compatibility super efficient as well. Developers see less issues between different OS versions, such as older OS versions and future OS versions. The Flutter team is constantly working to update its widget to ensure its apps function properly. Flutter widgets can also be updated by anyone!
Flutter is also open source, coupled with a massive community of dedicated developers who offer support, contribute to the Flutter’s documentation, and develop resources for Flutter that help new developers find their footing with it.
Tying it together
As of right now, Flutter is one of the most innovative and efficient mobile SDKs on the market. Its offerings make it a top competitor for the mobile tech use around the world in the future. I can’t wait to build my own Flutter app and you should start some work with it as well.
