There can be hardly any doubt about the fact that mobile app development are at the forefront of the digital universe and are shaping the lives and businesses of millions of people all over the globe.
User experience and app performance are at the center of contention among mobile app development companies.
Several technologies continue to play a great role in shaping app development. Among these technologies, Flutter happens to be the leading one now.
When choosing among cross-platform development technologies, Flutter is considered one of the two most sought-after frameworks along with React Native.
Why choose Flutter for cross-platform app development projects? What is so special about the Flutter development framework? What made Flutter rise in popularity within such a short span of time? We are going to explore these reasons one by one.
Extended Cross-Platform Development Ability
While other cross-platform frameworks and libraries remain limited to only iOS and Android app development, Flutter has the specialty of building apps for web and desktop by using the same codebase.
That means your app no longer needs to focus on the iOS and Android platforms but can also be extended to web and desktop platforms.
The extensive cross-platform capabilities of Flutter are further matched by the widget-based development offering UI widgets for every native operating system anchor reloading feature that allows faster iteration without platform-specific emulators.
Fast-paced development process
Flutter as the cross-platform framework offers all UI building widgets out of the box. You get inbuilt access to testing tools and Firebase backend support.
Moreover, unlike React Native, you don’t need a third-party API bridge to communicate with the native UI layers.
All of these together ensure optimum speed in app development. On top of all these, the hot reloading features allow quick evaluation of new code without reloading the entire app, which ensures faster speed in app development.
Awesome app performance
There is a common saying among the app developers that slow-loading apps are shown the faster exit doors by the users. These days, faster loading speed and app performance are two crucial criteria did an app to make an impact and become successful.
Flutter uses a high-speed skin graphics library with robust backend support, apart from loading the UI elements faster. Flutter UIs offer up to 120 frames per second speed, which is enough for the smooth loading of all graphic UI elements.
Optimum consistency of the UI across platforms
Despite rendering native and platform-specific UI elements, Flutter maintains thorough consistency of business logic across all platforms.
Flutter allows sharing the core codebase across platforms and allows sharing the UI across multiple platforms. This helps Flutter provide optimum consistency regarding user interface and user experience across all platforms.
Other cross-platform technologies like React Native need an API bridge to communicate with the native and platform-specific UI layers and corresponding components.
This, apart from slowing down the app performance, also poses a problem in regard to consistency. This is where inbuilt UI widgets of Flutter ensure smooth development and absolute consistency in terms of look and feel.
Since Flutter doesn’t require these platform-specific UI components for rendering the app UI, the framework is advantageous for faster development, faster app performance, and higher consistency of UI logic.
With Flutter, all native UI development capabilities are accessed through its inbuilt widgets without relying on third-party bridges.
As Flutter is gaining popularity right now, you can easily find Flutter developers for hire on platforms like Upwork, Linkedin, or via staff augmentation services.
Flutter is ideal for MVP development.
Minimum Viable Product or MVP is the most popular development approach to help you build an app incrementally with small value additions and changes through app updates.
This incremental development ensures more modularity in shaping an app project’s features and user experience. Moreover, with MVP development, you can always keep your development tasks at a minimum and shape the app over time with updates based upon user feedback.
Flutter perfectly fits into this development approach because of its modularity and ease of adding and extracting UI elements through widgets. This is why startup app development projects increasingly prefer Flutter for their app projects.
Flutter for cost advantage in-app projects
Flutter is great if you need to utilize all the ways to reduce your app development cost. Since Flutter allows reusing the same codebase across iOS, Android, web, and desktop platforms, the cost of coding the app is kept at a minimum.
Moreover, the modular development with the help of inbuilt UI widgets gives you more control while you spend less on UI development.
You can just port the same UI across multiple platforms and their underlying logic. This gives Flutter developers a lot of flexibility in respect of controlling the cost and time of development.
Flutter also provides out-of-the-box access to the Firebase backend, so you don’t need to look otherwise for a backend solution.
Being a modular framework helps you with MVP or incremental development approach, which is great for keeping the initial development cost to a minimum level.
Flutter requires minimum testing.
Flutter is a truly cross-platform development framework. It uses the same programming language for all the platforms, and the code s only translated for their respective target platform versions.
So, with Flutter, just one testing cycle is all you need to test all platform-specific versions.
Apart from the platform-agnostic attributes of Flutter that help in both development and testing, Flutter also offers an array of inbuilt testing tools to help developers debug and test their apps with ease.
Conclusion
In all regards, Flutter appears to be the most flexible, feature-rich, and highly extensible cross-platform app development framework with value propositions for every kind of app project.
Flutter can be a relatively new technology, but it already dominates a wider section of mobile app development projects worldwide.
