The growing industry of mobile phones and hence the mobile apps has pushed the development of new mobile app frameworks. Gone are the days when only native development frameworks were used for Mobile App Development. Today’s app development market has changed phenomenally with the addition of many powerful Cross-platform app development frameworks. One such forthcoming is Googles Mobile UI Framework named ‘Flutter’.
Flutter is an open source mobile app development framework which is mainly used for developing cross platform mobile apps for iOS and Android devices. Apps developed using Flutter SDK are able to deliver a very good user experience and helps launching apps like e-commerce, food and shopping very quickly as the developer has to write a single code base. With its key qualities such as Faster development, Attractive visuals, Cost-effectiveness, this Google Powered SDK is going to change the of Mobile App Development market completely.
Popularity of Flutter
It is very much in discussion that Flutter might replace Java for Android app development. There are certain reasons for which it is becoming more and more popular as compared to Java.
Productivity
To take an example of one of our recent Android app projects,it took us 2 months with 3 Java developers to develop the first version for Android native. At the same time, it took us only 1 Flutter developer for 3 months of time to develop the same app using Flutter. Moreover, the amount of code we had to write was 1/3 as compared to the Java code written for Android.
Cross platform performance
Many people have started believing that Flutter gives equally good performance as native apps on iOS and Android when they actually used apps developed using Flutter SDK.
Dart is much more like Java and not like JS
With the use of Dart – a compiled programming language, Flutter takes a rather different approach in order to avoid performance issues which are caused by the requirement for a JavaScript bridge. Dart allows Flutter to communicate with a particular platform without using a JavaScript bridge which does a context switching. By means of compiling to native code, it improves app start-up time.
High performing apps
Flutter is a framework which guides you to get adapted to the patterns such as reactive and composition development which was not possible with native app development languages like Java. This feature proves to be beneficial when your app grows larger.
Problems with Flutter
Though it offers a bunch of advantages as we saw above, Flutter needs more evolution to compete with native app development frameworks like Swift and Java.
- Flutter apps try a lot to look similar to native ones but they are a bit off.
- Another issue with Flutter framework is that it is not that native looking for iOS devices. It is mainly for Android users. It prioritizes Android platform support which is not bad but your cross-platform experience gets suffered due to that.
- There is not a single size which fits all solutions. Flutter is developed to support number of languages in backend but from the experience of developers it has been found that it only supports Dart for GUI part. The GUI is developed on the top of the stripped-down chrome. There is no JS and no DOM as dart is used like JS in browser.
- It is still an evolving framework with a limited community support. In future, Flutter may improve and gain traction amongst the developers but still it will have to compete with other popular cross-platform frameworks which are not native such as React Native.
Mobile app development companies should start adapting new app development frameworks, such as Flutter, to cope up with the market trends and customer needs but there are a few things which need to be ironed out before the adoption of such frameworks in mainstream for the enterprise mobile apps development.
Conclusion
Flutter is a relatively new and evolving framework which has potential to replace native app development frameworks like Java for Android. However, it has to address some of the key issues like limited support for iOS apps, native like performance and such.
Please feel free to connect with us to help you guide which framework is best suitable for your mobile app development projects.