Flutter Advantages and Benefits

 

Flutter is a hybrid mobile application development platform from Google that hit 1.0 in late 2018. While it’s a newer entrant in the list of hybrid development frameworks, the great ideas behind it have caused it to quickly catch on among developers.

My goal in this article is to explore these ideas and write about my experiences with Flutter, and why I feel it’s the future of hybrid mobile application development.

Even though there are older hybrid app frameworks in the market, there’s a growing list of big name companies that are choosing Flutter for their mobile applications. While the Flutter showcase page lists a lot of these, here are a few notable apps that use Flutter either for the entire app or for a significant feature:

• The Google Ads app
• GrabFood’s GrabMerchant app
• Alibaba Group’s Xianyu app, which has more than 50 million downloads
• The eBay Motors app

While the Flutter framework is quite capable, it is still relatively new. For the sake of balance, I’ll also discuss some limitations that you should be aware of before committing to Flutter.

Flutter Advantages (From a Development Perspective)

As a developer, this is the point of view I am most familiar with and can share the most information about.

Quick Learning Curve

The first pleasant surprise Flutter has for developers is just how quickly it is to get started. It takes less than 30 minutes to finish the installation process and have a working development environment set up. From there, you’re all set to create your first Flutter app.

Popular Editor Integration

Flutter also has great editor integrations. I personally use Android Studio, but there are instructions available to set up IntelliJ, VSCode, or Emacs.

Clean Development Process

Compared to my previous experience with hybrid app frameworks, the development process also feels cleaner. For example, when I used WebViews to display lists with many elements (around 100 or so), I had to deal with high CPU usage, especially when the user was scrolling the list. I resolved those by using Ionic framework elements specifically made for this. In Flutter, there is one accepted way of displaying lists, the ListView, which has amazing performance out of the box.

Live Reload

Another thing that pleasantly surprised me was the live reload functionality. As a full-stack developer, I was used to frameworks like Browser Watch providing live reload in the browser.

Native development doesn’t have that (but I think Swift UI from Apple is making some progress on that front for iOS development). Android and iOS developers typically need to write code and then wait for it to compile and be loaded on the device or simulator before they can see changes.

Flutter provides (a la React Native) a live reload mechanism, where the app code is reloaded on the device as soon as developers hit “save.” This gives immediate feedback, making development a lot faster.

Performance

Application performance is another metric where Flutter is slowly emerging as a winner.

Since the Flutter framework is under active development, there are many places where performance optimizations can be made. This is evident in, for example, Flutter 1.17, which increased rendering performance by up to 50% on newer iOS devices, and decreased memory consumption by up to 70% for certain types of workloads.

Cross-platform Consistency

Truly consistent UIs across both mobile platforms is another remarkable feature of Flutter. Because Flutter uses its own rendering engine—more on that later—the UI is exactly the same on iOS and Android. Developers no longer have to grapple with platform-specific styling issues to get everything looking exactly like the design: That guarantee is part of the framework.

Language, Tooling, and Extension

Three other smaller, but still important, aspects I feel should be mentioned here are:

• Dart, the language in which Flutter applications are programmed, is very simple to get started with. But it’s also quite a powerful language, originally intended by Google to replace JavaScript. If developers have any experience with JavaScript or other C-like languages, they will have no trouble picking up Dart within a day or two.
• There is a robust plugin manager (pub) included in the default tool chain and a huge library of plugins available through the pub.dev plugin repository.
• Creating plugins to take advantage of native platform capabilities is quite easy, so if developers need access to a platform feature for which no plugin already exists, coding one up isn’t too difficult.

Flutter Advantages (From a Business Perspective)

The biggest Flutter benefit that most businesses think of is only having to hire one team for both the iOS and Android platforms. However, a more important benefit that many businesses overlook is quicker time to market. Leveraging the development advantages in the previous section, a smaller development team can build a beautiful application with native performance that provides the same user experience on both platforms much more quickly using Flutter.

Flutter does allow developers to build some truly beautiful user interfaces. Take a look at a recent challenge from Google and Lenovo to build a beautiful clock face UI for the Lenovo Smart Clock. The winner, Particle Clock by Mickel Andersson, isn’t just uniquely elegant—it also showcases how performant animations are in Flutter.

For businesses considering Flutter but unsure if it’s the right way to go, Flutter can be leveraged incrementally: Preexisting mobile apps can integrate Flutter a single part at a time. In fact, that is how most large companies start out with Flutter, by building a small part of their existing application in Flutter, and then slowly replacing other parts once they see the benefits.

Limitations to Consider Before Using Flutter

In fairness, Flutter, being newer, is not quite as battle-tested as other hybrid mobile application frameworks like React Native—after all, React Native’s end-user reach covers the mobile apps of Facebook, Instagram, Skype, and Discord.

The default answer to “should I use Flutter?” is, for now, a cautious yes. This is because project managers still need to consider which, if any, advanced features they’ll need and make sure those features are available in Flutter before committing to using it. In particular, it’s worth asking which libraries and plugins a team might need to build a particular application. As a newer entry in mobile app frameworks, Flutter doesn’t have the extensive scope of libraries and plugins that React Native does.

For instance, camera support in Flutter isn’t complete yet, with zooming and flash control not yet a part of the official camera plugin. For me, that wasn’t a deal breaker, as I was able to find a third-party plugin when I needed to integrate photo/video functionality in an app I was building.

Another major plugin that you might miss is Google Maps. There are no Dart-native Google Maps plugins, and while there is a plugin to allow integrating Google Maps into your Flutter code, it uses features of Flutter (platform views) that are still in developers’ preview status.

One more thing that won’t affect many projects, but you should be aware of, is that for now, Flutter doesn’t support any 3D capabilities. The team is focusing on 2D only for now. But most applications don’t use any 3D functionality, so this should not be a deal-breaker for the majority of developers.

Thank You 

Businesquare Technology

Indian IT Outsourcing Company
For Offshore Software Development Services