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Flutter for Cross-Platform App Development: To use or not to use?

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In recent years, the popularity of cross-platform mobile app development has been increasing. As an app development platform, it has been catering to the needs of forward-thinking businesses. Android and iOS have been the most popular platforms to develop mobile apps. It is necessary to write different codes, when you develop apps on these platforms. However, with cross-platform app development, you can save your efforts and time. Various tools have been developed to facilitate cross-platform development of apps. You must be familiar with web-based tools like Xamarin developed by Microsoft, PhoneGap developed by Adobe, and React Native developed by Facebook. Developers have varying opinions on whether they should use Flutter for cross-platform app development. Here, you will come to know about its features, pros and cons. What is Flutter and Why Was It Developed? Flutter is a software development kit (SDK) for mobile apps, developed by Google. It has been developed to build mobile applications for the major app development platforms, like Android and iOS. As an open-source framework, Flutter is free and it offers a complete package of development tools, widgets and frameworks. This enables the app developers get a better experience, easing up the process. Although Flutter is a comparatively new tool, companies like Tencent and Alibaba have already embraced the technology. Besides, Flutter is being used by Google in the app called ‘Google Ads’. Therefore, Flutter has already proven its importance in developing native-looking apps on Android and iOS, using the same code base. As a full product, Flutter has made its way into the market since December 2018. Important facts about Flutter The enriched UI elements of Flutter follow particular guidelines Flutter is open source and comes free of cost The Flutter architecture is based on reactive programming The developers can benefit from its highly customizable and fast widgets An object-oriented programming language, called Dart, has been used to develop Flutter The C++ rendering engine is used in Flutter React Native app development turns out to be the main competitor of Flutter What Google has worked on Support for app development on Windows Key parts of the engine to enhance performance Tooling for Visual Studio Code and Android Studio Support for a greater number of Firebase APIs Support for ads, charts and online video Accessibility and internationalization Impressive documentation Bug fixes This software development kit, enables the developers to come up with 2D mobile apps. It can be used to build feature-rich apps, which support, geolocation, cameras, storage and network. To develop high-quality stock apps or branded designs, Flutter is perfectly suitable. Pros and Cons of Flutter Before you consider using Flutter to develop your business apps, have a look at its pros and cons. Pros of Flutter Flutter has many advantages that attract app developers as well as business owners to choose this framework. Here are some of the major benefits of Flutter: Developing Android and iOS Apps Simultaneously The same code base is used in Android and iOS apps that are built using Flutter. Therefore, it is not necessary to develop a particular system and then repeat the same mechanism for the other. Apps that are developed using Flutter are equally effective on both Google and Apple platforms. The process requires less coding during development and business firms can launch the apps on both the platforms simultaneously. Faster Prototyping The hot reload feature of Flutter is one of the core aspects, which convinces the developers. Using this feature, they can perceive any change that is made to the code in real time. They need not restart the app. The source code, which is updated, can be injected to the app under a running condition. The widget tree is automatically built by Flutter, so that the changes show up in real time. The benefit of hot reload is that, the process becomes dramatically faster. The entire process is improved and the developers are able to identify the bugs, no sooner than they appear. Eventually, they can test the new features or UI without any hassle. Lesser Coding The Dart programming language used in Flutter app development is strongly typed and object-oriented in nature. In Flutter, the programming style is declarative and reactive. The JavaScript bridge is not necessary in Flutter, that enhances the overall performance and startup time of the app. The AOT (Ahead-of-Time) compilation makes it possible for Dart to achieve this. Dart also uses the JIT (Just-in-Time) compilation that enhances the development workflow, permitting the hot reload feature to get the UI refreshed during the development process. Therefore, it is not necessary to build it from the scratch. Suitable for MVP At times, business firms need to showcase their products to investors in a short time. In these situations, a Flutter mobile app can serve the purpose. On both Android and iOS platforms, the apps look native. This will enable the investors gain a better idea on the final look of the MVP. It costs more money and takes far more time to develop two separate apps. Evidently, it can enhance the productivity of your business. Widgets Regardless of the size of the screen, the widgets should be having a natural look. These are needed for the view and interface of the apps. Besides, your widgets should be easily customizable, extensible and fast. Flutter comes with an enriched set of widgets, which offers extensive capabilities to create intricate customized widgets. Besides, these can be used for the app itself as well as for the entire screens. The documentation in Flutter states that each widget comes as an absolute declaration of the user interface. Other frameworks separate view controllers, views, layouts and various other properties. On the other hand, Flutter comes with these widgets as a unified object model. Cons of Flutter The Flutter framework is comparatively young, and it will still be developing. The toolkit comes with certain flaws, as presented here: Limitations in Libraries Although Flutter has several important libraries, the framework is comparatively new. You might not find all the

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Why Choose Flutter for MVP Development?

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While launching a new app, the product development time is one of the most prioritized factors, which clients focus on. At times, this is placed even ahead of the project budget. Of course, companies can enjoy a competitive advantage, as they can tap their market before their competitors do. It is for this reason that a fast MVP (Minimum Viable Product) serves as an effective strategy for several companies. They implement these to test the requirements of their customers. Why is an MVP Necessary? An MVP can be defined as a simpler version of your software that can solve your problem. The software development time needs to be as short as possible. Companies waiting long to develop these products are susceptible to high competition. In the process, they may lose the strategic edge in the industry. However, with a working version of the software, startups can approach their investors. They can also be an early entrant in the industry. Validating a business idea becomes easier, when you have an MVP. A statistic reveals that 70% of tech startups fail to thrive, normally around 20 months after they receive the first financing, primarily due to poor market research. However, when you run a test using an MVP, the difference can be huge. It can prevent business failures, as you can obtain feedback and check out the needs of your customers. An MVP serves as a tool to realize the true potential of a given idea. Accordingly, you can plan the right direction of steering your business. Another core benefit of using an MVP is that, brands can promote their products earlier. In the process, they can reach out to the early adopters much faster. When you get an idea of the preferences of your users, you can incorporate the changes, while developing the product on full-scale. Besides, a tangible outcome of your product can help you attract investors. Most importantly, business firms need not invest resources in features that do not appeal to users. Evidently, an MVP can complement your marketing strategy right from scratch. Hybrid Apps and Flutter: A Brief Background Xamarin, a company which is presently owned by Microsoft, emerged in 2011 to foster better hybrid app development. This brought about a revolution in the development of hybrid apps. The idea was to simplify the coding and use the same code for developing apps on both platforms. Next, Ionic gained popularity in 2013, and Drift Co. was behind this development. The developers could come up with sophisticated apps, using their existing abilities. React.js was used by Facebook in 2015 for mobile app development. This was the beginning of React Native, a relatively new code base for JavaScript. Other hybrid frameworks were also present in the market, which the developers bypassed to carry out developments natively on Java. In December 2018, Flutter 1.0 was released by Google. Over 18 months, Google had the software in beta. The Dart programming language was used in this tool. Dart, developed by Google, is similar to C. As an OOP programming language, it was easy to be used by developers who knew Java or C. They could seamlessly adapt to the language. Besides, ECMA has approved Dart as a programming language and it is not a mobile only language. The developers can use Dart to develop anything on the servers, web, desktop and mobile apps. After this, mobile app developers have been extensively using Flutter to enjoy a seamless app development process. Why Should Businesses Adopt an MVP? In order to validate your business idea, an MVP needs to be developed. It confirms the interest of the users in the products you are planning to launch. Using an MVP can minimize possible errors by testing the product on a small scale, or creating a hypothesis. MVP deals with balancing the offerings of your business to the users with that they actually need. Business firms adopting MVPs can benefit in several ways. They can remain within a limited budget, while launching their apps quickly Save time while developing the app, finding the right target group Gather feedback about a given app, further improvising the product Save resources, money and time, ensuring that they channelize their efforts to develop a product that will probably be successful Find early adopters of the product by acquiring a potential base of customers For business firms, it is advisable to start with limited features in the basic model. Successful companies often follow this strategy. Companies That Have Successfully Implemented MVPs It is interesting to study how successful companies got started with an MVP. Many of the successful brands like Uber, Instagram and Buffer experimented with MVPs. Buffer Buffer is a popular social media account scheduling and management software. It was started as a two page site with minimal features. The developers adopted the lean methodology, presenting the idea to examine whether or not his product would appeal to the people. Eventually, the Buffer team came up with a web app, which supported only Twitter, integrated with a Chrome extension feature. Dropbox You must be familiar with Dropbox, the popular cloud storage platform. In the early days, the company encountered financial challenges. They required money to do away with technological problems, before the MVP could be launched. The investors, too, found it difficult to get a clear idea of their pitch, since they were not trying out any solution. Besides, the concept was very innovative and it lied beyond their imagination. Therefore, a video MVP was created by Dree Huston, explaining the idea behind Dropbox. Uber Transportation mechanisms within and even between cities have evolved, thanks to app cabs. Before the inception of Uber, people had to wait for a long time to avail a cab. People can now call cabs through their smartphones. The MVP developed for Uber was designed to test whether it was viable to develop an on-call taxi service without a call centre. The developers used GPS in sharing the locations of taxi drivers, while connecting

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Is Flutter Overtaking Native App Development in the Future?

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Technology has been growing and expanding exponentially each day. With new trends setting in and modern age tech usage increasing, app and web development aren’t the same as they used to be even before just a few years ago. Simplifying the complicated processes of development, native app development is continuously being replaced by techniques that seem to be better and more useful. Flutter app development has been one of the techniques among the growing trends. It is an open-source, free, and a new framework that is being used to design applications for many platforms with just a single code. The growing user demands as per the diversification of the platforms are creating a big demand for support in the development process which the flutter app development seems to suffice successfully. With the advent of new versions and platforms, the companies have been struggling to come up with a faster and relatively easier development process which therefore has been a major opportunity for flutter app development to rise and grow. Flutter vs. Native Application Development Let’s discuss few key aspects of Flutter that has affected the native app development. Productivity Working with the traditional tools and tech support, developers have been striving to build an app from scratch every time there’s a requirement for a similar app, but for a different platform. This further complicates the work for the developer and tends to affect the efficiency and effectiveness. The development also has several tech requirements to suffice the need for every new development for a new platform. Flutter app development has been a great choice for the same. The process requires fewer amounts of codes to be written and fewer tools that are specific for a particular platform. The developers don’t need to start the development process from scratch every time they go ahead with a development process for an app for a new platform. This helps the developers to be effective and time-efficient making it a great choice to work with. UI Elements The development process is backed up by the Flutter itself. It assists by offering a great variety of host services of powerful UI elements to build a custom user interface with even more ease and has been equipped with its widgets to empower the high-end UI support. Flutter app developers dedicated to the same are experts to build highly responsive UI interface designs. Technical Architect Backed up by Google, both the frameworks, Android and Flutter have their different support architecture. The Native Android app development uses Kotlin or Java language, while Flutter uses Dart as a programming language. Testing Support Android being a prominent platform in the industry provides several tools to test the native apps developed by the developers. However, Flutter provides its robust testing platform that lets the developers test the app at various steps of the development process. It also has a combined feature of testing the widgets which allows the testing the execution of the UI interface developed through widgets. The tests are run in a separate process that can be run in real-time or on real devices as well. CI/CD Support The process of development and launching native apps is bit complicated outside the IDE. Yes, Android Studio does provide all the support needed for build automaton and testing capabilities. However, third-party CI/CD servers such as Jenkins and TeamCity are warranted because Android doesn’t have dedicated CI/CD system from Google. To that end, Flutter leads the way as it has the support of Codemagic. The latter enables CI/CD systems without glitches. It also automates the identification, testing, building and packaging of Flutter apps without the need for configuration. Codemagic further simplifies development, testing and launching of apps to Play Store. Is Flutter All Set to Replace Existing Native App Development? Flutter is quite new in the market and has not been yet been accustomed to the developers. However, it is gaining the limelight quickly and is being seen as one of the important aspects of the future of application development. Although it’s a new programming language, Flutter is easy to learn. It has now come up with a full-fledged working model after a successful beta version test. Flutter app development is widely being preferred by some of the leading brands in the world and is gaining popularity quickly. Long story short, Flutter is easy to work with. App development using this language is efficient and less time-consuming. With its support, it is relatively easier to develop similar or even better interfaces. This probably gives Flutter app development several benefits and an edge over the native app development process. However, going ahead with Flutter app development straightaway is not a very wise choice. Going ahead with a development process and choosing one among many is totally dependent upon the requirements, budget, and goal of the development process. Although a number of leading brands and companies are widely choosing Flutter, there still are some points to consider before going ahead blindly. Flutter app development is pretty cheap and cost-effective and incurs less amount of money than native app development process making it more suitable for SMEs and other small organizations. At the same time, it requires no separate development process for different platforms and equips an organization with a single app for multiple platforms to use with similar ease and features. Organizations wanting to present a feature-rich platform for separate platforms and have no budget and time constraints would like to probably go ahead with the development of a native app. The native app still provides best features and specifications but the organizations not needing the extreme benefits of the same may not need it and may go ahead with the Flutter app development process and work with similar efficiency. Flutter is full of features and options that make it a reliable option but not perfect yet. Flutter lacks in features and support like OpenGL, Maps, Video Support, and Accessibility Support. It still has gaps that are required to be filled to make

Is Flutter Overtaking Native App Development in the Future? Read More »

Is Flutter Overtaking Native App Development in the Future?

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

Technology has been growing and expanding exponentially each day. With new trends setting in and modern age tech usage increasing, app and web development aren’t the same as they used to be even before just a few years ago. Simplifying the complicated processes of development, native app development is continuously being replaced by techniques that seem to be better and more useful. Flutter app development has been one of the techniques among the growing trends. It is an open-source, free, and a new framework that is being used to design applications for many platforms with just a single code. The growing user demands as per the diversification of the platforms are creating a big demand for support in the development process which the flutter app development seems to suffice successfully. With the advent of new versions and platforms, the companies have been struggling to come up with a faster and relatively easier development process which therefore has been a major opportunity for flutter app development to rise and grow. Flutter vs. Native Application Development Let’s discuss few key aspects of Flutter that has affected the native app development. Productivity Working with the traditional tools and tech support, developers have been striving to build an app from scratch every time there’s a requirement for a similar app, but for a different platform. This further complicates the work for the developer and tends to affect the efficiency and effectiveness. The development also has several tech requirements to suffice the need for every new development for a new platform. Flutter app development has been a great choice for the same. The process requires fewer amounts of codes to be written and fewer tools that are specific for a particular platform. The developers don’t need to start the development process from scratch every time they go ahead with a development process for an app for a new platform. This helps the developers to be effective and time-efficient making it a great choice to work with. UI Elements The development process is backed up by the Flutter itself. It assists by offering a great variety of host services of powerful UI elements to build a custom user interface with even more ease and has been equipped with its widgets to empower the high-end UI support. Flutter app developers dedicated to the same are experts to build highly responsive UI interface designs. Technical Architect Backed up by Google, both the frameworks, Android and Flutter have their different support architecture. The Native Android app development uses Kotlin or Java language, while Flutter uses Dart as a programming language. Testing Support Android being a prominent platform in the industry provides several tools to test the native apps developed by the developers. However, Flutter provides its robust testing platform that lets the developers test the app at various steps of the development process. It also has a combined feature of testing the widgets which allows the testing the execution of the UI interface developed through widgets. The tests are run in a separate process that can be run in real-time or on real devices as well. CI/CD Support The process of development and launching native apps is bit complicated outside the IDE. Yes, Android Studio does provide all the support needed for build automaton and testing capabilities. However, third-party CI/CD servers such as Jenkins and TeamCity are warranted because Android doesn’t have dedicated CI/CD system from Google. To that end, Flutter leads the way as it has the support of Codemagic. The latter enables CI/CD systems without glitches. It also automates the identification, testing, building and packaging of Flutter apps without the need for configuration. Codemagic further simplifies development, testing and launching of apps to Play Store. Is Flutter All Set to Replace Existing Native App Development? Flutter is quite new in the market and has not been yet been accustomed to the developers. However, it is gaining the limelight quickly and is being seen as one of the important aspects of the future of application development. Although it’s a new programming language, Flutter is easy to learn. It has now come up with a full-fledged working model after a successful beta version test. Flutter app development is widely being preferred by some of the leading brands in the world and is gaining popularity quickly. Long story short, Flutter is easy to work with. App development using this language is efficient and less time-consuming. With its support, it is relatively easier to develop similar or even better interfaces. This probably gives Flutter app development several benefits and an edge over the native app development process. However, going ahead with Flutter app development straightaway is not a very wise choice. Going ahead with a development process and choosing one among many is totally dependent upon the requirements, budget, and goal of the development process. Although a number of leading brands and companies are widely choosing Flutter, there still are some points to consider before going ahead blindly. Flutter app development is pretty cheap and cost-effective and incurs less amount of money than native app development process making it more suitable for SMEs and other small organizations. At the same time, it requires no separate development process for different platforms and equips an organization with a single app for multiple platforms to use with similar ease and features. Organizations wanting to present a feature-rich platform for separate platforms and have no budget and time constraints would like to probably go ahead with the development of a native app. The native app still provides best features and specifications but the organizations not needing the extreme benefits of the same may not need it and may go ahead with the Flutter app development process and work with similar efficiency. Flutter is full of features and options that make it a reliable option but not perfect yet. Flutter lacks in features and support like OpenGL, Maps, Video Support, and Accessibility Support. It still has gaps that are required to be filled to make

Is Flutter Overtaking Native App Development in the Future? Read More »