Flutter: The future of hybrid mobile development
Mobile app and web development is one of the most challenging tasks today. With the competition to represent almost every company on the digital front constantly increasing, be it a mobile application or web platforms, developers today are expected to work smarter and more efficiently to develop ideas. With the need of developing mobile apps on both, Android and iOS, the future of mobile apps is without a doubt, turning towards hybrid development.
One of the additions to the hybrid app development scene, since 2015, is Flutter – a powerful UI Toolkit created by Google, for building native applications for mobile and web, from a single codebase. Flutter is an open source framework, providing a simple and powerful SDK to write applications in Dart, a language created by Google. Over a short period of time, it has been widely accepted in the industry as a strong, reliable platform, thanks to some of its unique features and efficiency.
One of the biggest strengths of the platform is the hot reload feature, which helps developers to build UIs, fix bugs, add features and explore possibilities on physical or virtual screens, in the debug mode, by simply injecting the changes in the Dart Virtual Machine (VM) mode. Flutter then automatically rebuilds the widget tree, while preserving the original state of the app. Thus, the developer can view the effects of the most recent changes in real-time, without eliminating the current state.The advantages which Flutter promises over the other platforms are not only a more streamlined approach in mobile app development, but an overall enhanced experience for both, the developers, as well as the end-users.
The advantages which Flutter promises over the other platforms are not only a more streamlined approach in mobile app development, but an overall enhanced experience for both, the developers, as well as the end-users.
- A single code-base for both Android and iOS applications needs to be written. This also means faster performance, lesser testing time and more efficient maintenance.
- Easy-to-use and great developer tools, with amazing customization capabilities.
- Dart language is simple to learn and comes with a large repository of packages to help extend application capabilities.
- Flutter boasts of a huge catalog of ready-to-use Material Design and Cupertino widgets, along with complete control over the layout. Flutter widgets support hand gestures and animations, for a better app features.
- Beautiful user interfaces for a smooth experience for end-users.
In a competitive market, which is flooded with competition, Flutter has made a name for itself as one of the most promising app development platforms. Through its simplistic development process and higher performance, Flutter gives developers complete freedom to build mobile applications in a way, which is truly platform-independent. The framework has been widely accepted by the mobile application market and is being used by even larger players and renowned tech-companies.
What remains to see in the near future is the capabilities which mobile app developers can bring out through Flutter, to create magic on mobile screens.