In this article, I am going to discuss flutter and its benefits, and also we will see why flutter became so popular in this short time period. So before going to make any delay let’s start,
- What is flutter
- Future of cross-platform
- Design and widgets
- Who is using flutter
- Community Support
- Conclusion
These are the points I am going to elaborate in detail, so stay tuned.
What is flutter?
Flutter is an open-source mobile SDK (Software Development Kit) created by Google to build native applications for android, iOS, web, desktop, and embedded devices from a single codebase.
In 2015 at the Dart Developer Summit flutter was announced. It was initially called “Sky”. In 2017 flutter alpha version (0.0.6) was released. In September 2018 Google launched the second preview of flutter.
Flutter was taken some popularity before coming to the stable version, Then on 5th December 2018, Google announced flutter stable version Flutter 1.0.
But still, the flutter web app was not available in a stable version because there was some issue with null-safety and external packages, but at that time you can make a flutter web app also after switching to the beta channel.
If you ask me personally then my opinion is building a web app in the beta channel was very painful, because at that time some packages were not available for the web and most of the time it was giving null-safety issues.
On 23rd March 2021 during an online Flutter Engage event Google announced a big release Flutter 2.0, In this release web app is available in the stable channel and included null-safety that has caused many breaking changes and issues with most of the external packages.
I think now in your mind a question will come what is a channel in flutter and how many channels are there and so on similar questions. If you want to know more about flutter channels you can visit this link.
Some key points,
- Flutter is developed by Google.
- Flutter is using a single codebase.
- Flutter can build cross-platform apps as well as web and desktop apps too
- Flutter can run apps on 120 fps (Frame Per Second) where others can achieve only a maximum of 60 fps.
- Flutter is written in C, C++, and Dart language.
- Google released Flutter 2.2.3 on 02nd July 2021.
If you want to know more about what is flutter, you can visit the below links,
Future of cross-platform
Yes, you read correctly flutter will become the next future in upcoming years for cross-platform application development.
Before flutter, there were so many cross-platform development frameworks like React Native, Xamarin, Angular, Ionic, etc But Xamarin and React Native was more popular than other cross-platform frameworks.
After flutter is released you can see in the below image how the popularity graph changed.
![Why choose flutter for cross-platform development]()
Image Source: Google Developer Blog
Design and widgets
Flutter is very easy for designers, it is using material design so it is easy to design and looks better. And in the flutter, there will be no platform-specific design issues. In other cross-platform frameworks most of the time platform-specific design issues will come for UI design.
Everything in flutter is widgets. Developers can make an elegant and expressive UI by combining different widgets in line with the client’s business models. Flutter has rich widgets support for structural elements, stylistic elements, and etc. There is one more benefit flutter developers can create their own custom widgets.
Who is using flutter
World most valuable and top companies are using the flutter, here is some companies name that is using flutter,
- Google (Google Ads, Google Assistance, and Google Pay)
- BMW
- Alibaba
- eBay
- Square
- Dream 11
- ByteDance, etc
Many start-up companies are using flutter but above I have written few most popular company names.
If you want to know more about start-up companies and apps names that are using flutter you can go on Flutter official youtube channel where they posted some developer stories series where you can see most of the start-up companies are using flutter for cross-platform app development, so this is the link where you can visit too.
Community Support
A flutter community of active developers that can help other developers to resolve their issues fast and save the developers time and effort. Google I/O team always working on flutter supports and maintains that makes the platform more reliable. It is easy to discuss new features and clear doubts.
There are many developers worldwide contributing to the flutter community and keep flutter development cycle shooter.
More than 500 developers are working on flutter in the ByteDance company and contributing to flutter development. If you want to more about this you can check out this article.
If you want to know more about flutter community supports and its benefits please visit here.
Conclusion
Finally, we are now in the conclusion section, So you can see the above-discussed points how the flutter is growing and capturing the cross-platform development market. But here I am going to give my conclusion in two parts,
- Developers who want to learn flutter
- Companies who want to adapt flutter
Developers who want to learn flutter
From a developer's point of view, flutter is very good for cross-platform application development frameworks, and it is booming in the market now. Flutter is easy to learn and good community support.
The companies who want to adapt flutter
In the above points, you can see world most famous and valuable companies are using flutter, So it is good to build your app in the flutter, there are some benefits from the company perspective also like,
- You don’t need to hire different developer for ios and android
- You can build natively cross-platform apps
- It will take less time compared to other cross-platform frameworks
- It will reduce your cost of development
- It has a good UI design
- One single codebase and etc
If you like this article please comment and like that motivates me to write more, Thanks for reading.