• October 16, 2020 6:02 pm
• by Aruthra

Long gone the days when only native frameworks were used for app development.

Nowadays, mobile app developers are increasingly using cross platform frameworks to build apps for mobile OS and web. The use of native mobile app development languages such as Kotlin, Java, Swift, Objective C, etc is expected to fall over time.

Cross-platform frameworks: What are its advantages?

The main advantage that you can get out of cross-platform frameworks is that you can build your mobile apps for both iOS and Android from a single codebase. This will allow you to minimize risk, reduce defects, and accelerate the time-to-market of your mobile app. Moreover, If you have a single code base for both iOS and Android, it means minimal testing!. Having a single codebase gives you the added advantage to test your apps faster by writing automated tests.

However, If you use Native mobile app development frameworks, you need to build separate apps for Android and iOS. Some of the trending cross-platform frameworks that are available today include React Native, Xamarin, Corona SDK, Adobe PhoneGap / Apache Cordova, Flutter, Ionic, and more. Out of these cross-platform frameworks, Google’s Mobile UI Framework Flutter has now stolen the attention of many mobile app developers.

It is better to call Flutter as an SDK rather than just a framework. Flutter is one of the easiest and productive software development toolkits that are available today for building natively compiled cross-platform apps. Today, Flutter is used by mobile app developers across the world to build millions of mobile applications. Apps that are built on Flutter can virtually run on any device such as smartphones, desktops, wearables, or even on TV. As Google is constantly improving Flutter to meet futuristic needs, you can soon expect IoT support on it in the near future.

In this blog post, we will drill down some of the reasons why Flutter development is different when compared to other frameworks and why you should choose Flutter for your next mobile app development.

Popularity:

Flutter is a highly popular framework among the developer community and has got around 1.5 million stars on GitHub. If we look at the stack overflow survey from 2019, many developers chose Flutter over other frameworks. You can clearly see from the below data that Flutter has won over React Native.

Why Flutter?

1. Hot Reload: One of the cool things that you can find interesting about this framework is its hot reload feature. With this feature, whenever you make any change in code, it will rebuild automatically, and the application will get reloaded. You don’t have to manually build and refresh to see the changes. However, It doesn’t really mean you can see the change once your peer developer makes any change. In order to see the changes in real-time that your peer developer made, they should commit after they made the changes, then you need to pull. This feature also enables better collaboration between your development team and UI/UX team to make modifications in the app design on the go.
2. Minimal Code: With Flutter, you often need to write less code. And where there’s less code, there are fewer bugs. Along with that, it uses Dart as its programming language. Dart is an object-oriented and strongly typed programming language that was developed by Google. Dart is extensively used by mobile app developers to build cross-platform mobile apps. Since Dart can compile native iOS code easily, mobile apps that are built on Flutter will give you a more native experience.
3. Easy to configure: Flutter is easy to Install & configure when compared to other mobile app development frameworks. The Installation & configuration procedures of Flutter are more straightforward.
4. Near Native Performance: As Flutter uses C++ in its core, iOS, or Android apps that are written in this programming language often exhibit high performance that can be compared to native apps. Moreover, When compared to other cross-platform frameworks, you won’t need any specific additional templating languages and visual tools to build UI on Flutter. This allows you to develop multiple controls, interactive widgets, and customizable tools. Thanks to the Skia C++ engine, Flutter eliminates the need for a bridge that interacts between the OS and framework. This will help the app to exhibit high performance and can even render up to 120fps graphics like native apps. In its latest update, the developers at Google made significant performance improvements to Flutter.
5. Easy UI development: When you are building mobile apps on native mobile app development frameworks, you’ll probably waste a lot of your valuable time building UI. However, in the case of Flutter, the difficulty to build UI can be eased with the help of pre built components. Apple supports UIKit to create powerful and fast interfaces. Flutter app development delivers you with a set of design systems guided by the Material Components library that is flexible for both operating systems.

With all these cool advantages Flutter delivers, it’s arguably the best cross-platform framework that you can use for your next mobile app development project. It’s hot reload feature, near native performance, easy UI development, and ready-to-use components make it a perfect candidate to build a hybrid mobile app. We hope this article gave you a clear picture of hybrid mobile app development on Flutter.

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