Having a mobile application for your business is essential nowadays, if your business relies heavily on a mobile application then you must invest in a mobile development team. The mobile team will set down and choose the best framework for your application depending on your business needs in terms of performance, maintainability and development time. Flutter is an excellent choice for mobile app development, especially when it comes to cross-platform development. In this article we will discuss the advantages of using flutter in your business’s mobile applications.
An Introduction to Flutter
Flutter is an open source user interface software development toolkit created by Google. It is used to develop cross platform applications, which means, an application developed in Flutter can run on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and IOS. You’ll never have to maintain multiple codebases again!
Flutter adopts the widget-based approach. Flutter’s architecture revolves around widgets. Everything in Flutter is a widget, from simple UI elements like buttons and text fields to complex layouts. Widgets are lightweight, reusable building blocks that define the UI and behavior of your app.
Additionally, Flutter’s “Hot Reload” feature allows real-time code changes without losing app state. It speeds up development by instantly reflecting changes in the UI.
What gives this power to flutter is that it comes with its own language and its own rendering engine, the rendering engine is responsible for communication with the underlying platform to render the application visual elements, such as: text, graphics, widgets … etc. Unlike many other mobile application development frameworks that rely on the platform for rendering.
Single Codebase for Multiple Platforms
One of the most significant advantages of using Flutter is the ability to write once and deploy across multiple platforms. This eliminates the need for separate development teams and resources for each platform, reducing both the time and cost associated with app development.
Maintaining a single codebase is inherently simpler and more efficient than managing multiple codebases. Updates, bug fixes, and new features can be implemented once and deployed simultaneously across all platforms.
With the need to write code only once, the time required to bring an app to market is significantly reduced. This is particularly advantageous for startups and businesses looking to quickly validate their ideas and gain a competitive edge.
Rich and Customizable UI
Flutter uses a rich set of customizable widgets to create a seamless and interactive user interface. These widgets are the building blocks of a Flutter application and are designed to be highly flexible and performant. Developers can easily create custom widgets or modify existing ones to fit their design requirements. While, widgets are rendered directly by Flutter’s high-performance rendering engine, ensuring smooth animations and transitions.
High Performance
Flutter uses Dart, an object-oriented programming language also developed by Google. Dart is designed for client-side development and offers several benefits, such as Ahead-of-Time (AOT) Compilation which compiles Dart to native code, providing high performance. With Just-in-Time (JIT) Compilation, hot reloading is facilitated during development, speeding up the development process. Additionally, Dart’s syntax is easy to learn for developers familiar with JavaScript, Java, or C#.
Despite being a cross-platform framework, Flutter provides access to native functionalities and APIs through platform channels. This ensures that apps built with Flutter can leverage platform-specific features without compromising performance or user experience.
Integration and Compatibility
Flutter is a new technology, and businesses have been developing applications using native frameworks since a long time ago. Flutter doesn’t require rewriting your entire codebase into Dart. One of Flutter’s key strengths is its ability to integrate seamlessly with existing technologies and systems, ensuring compatibility with various development environments, tools, and native features. This capability makes Flutter a flexible choice for businesses looking to streamline their development processes while maintaining robust functionality.
Flutter provides the “Add-to-App” feature, which allows developers to integrate Flutter modules into existing native applications. This means you can add Flutter screens or widgets to a native iOS or Android app without needing to rewrite the entire app in Flutter.
Additionally, platform channels in Flutter enable communication between Dart (Flutter’s programming language) and the native code (Java/Kotlin for Android and Swift/Objective-C for iOS). This allows Flutter apps to use native APIs and third-party SDKs seamlessly.
How Flutter Differs from Other Frameworks
As businesses look for an efficient way to develop applications that run seamlessly on multiple platforms, Flutter’s single codebase for every platform is quite appealing for business, as it significantly cuts development cost and development time.
Each framework has its philosophy plus strengths that appeal to different needs or Every framework has its own unique design and functionality.
With the rise of cross-platform mobile frameworks such React Native, Xamarin, and Ionic. Flutter stands out for its high performance, user friendly interface and rich widget-based architecture. It enables fast development with hot reloading, which enables real-time updates without losing app states. Additionally, it enables high performance with native-like performance due to ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation.
With these advantages, it has its own drawbacks. Flutter is fairly new relative to the other well-established frameworks, as a result, it has a smaller ecosystem compared to other frameworks. We also mentioned that Flutter uses its own programming language (Dart), and because Dart is less popular than Javascript, it may require developers to learn a new language.
Flutter offers high performance relative to React Native, as React’s performance can be lower than native apps, especially for complex applications. However, React Native has a large and mature ecosystem with a vast number of libraries and plugins.
In conclusion, Flutter is an excellent choice if you’re just starting out with developing your business application or want to integrate new features into your existing applications. Jobzella can be a significant asset to find the best flutter developers. If you want to become a flutter mobile development for top tech companies in Egypt start applying here.
