Why is Flutter App Development the Best Choice for Cross-Platform App Projects?

Not long ago, app projects used to choose development technologies for building one app across multiple platforms. This "develop once and run everywhere" approach popularized as hybrid development was embraced by countless businesses and startups for fulfilling their app development ambition involving less cost and development time. Hybrid app development frameworks such as PhoneGap and Ionic were also popular because of their dependence on standard web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

But there were several drawbacks of this hybrid development approach. The main objection for hybrid apps was their compromising user experience compared to native iOS and native Android apps. This was when React Native was launched, bringing its cross-platform development approach. Around 90% of the core codebase can be shared across iOS and Android while leaving the rest of the coding scope for building platforms specific native user interfaces. In a way, it brought together the best of both hybrid and native app development.

Following the footsteps of React Native, another more advanced cross-platform development framework was launched by Google, and thus we got Flutter. Flutter is more developer-friendly as it uses a lean coding language called Dart and doesn't need a bridge to connect to the native UI layer. Businesses are now hiring Flutter developers because it is more modular and has robust UI development widgets that handle all specific UI development needs for app projects of all sizes and niches.

According to many app developers, Flutter stands as the ultimate cross-platform technology for app projects of all types. A blog from StackOverflow states Flutter is the most popular cross-platform SDK. Moreover, according to Statista, Flutter even outperformed React Native and has become the top cross-platform mobile framework used by software developers worldwide. 

Manageable Learning Curve

You can hardly mention a UI development toolkit or actual programming language that one can learn without rigorous effort. But when a framework like Flutter offers robust, detailed, and easy-to-understand documentation with diverse references and examples, the developers' learning curve becomes pretty manageable.

The programming language used by Flutter offers another tried and tested way to reduce the learning curve reasonably within manageable limits.

Flutter's Dart programming language is boldly typed with excellent consistency and an object-oriented nature.

Besides allowing developers to code quickly with simple coding syntax, it offers several excellent features that are missing with other leading cross-platform frameworks, including React Native. Most importantly, Dart is similar to common languages such as Java, C, and TypeScript. This ensures easy learning by developers with prior experience with these languages.

Widget Based Modular Development

Every UI element is available in Flutter through widgets of different types and capacities. One of the critical reasons Flutter development costs is lower is the availability of multiple UI building widgets addressing requirements of leading design principles such as Google Material Design, Apple's Cupertino, and Foundation. You can create a platform-specific user interface design enriched with custom themes using all these widgets.

The most important thing that keeps checking on development time and cost is that developers using several unique UI elements do not need to integrate third-party libraries. This also allows changing any UI element at any time. So, an app can be developed as a Proof of Concept (POC) or Minimum Viable Product (MVP) product and allow subsequent value additions or changes as suitable for the app project.

Hot Reload

Hot reloading is one of the most acclaimed features of the Flutter app development framework. Thanks to the hot reload feature, the developers in real-time see the impact of the code changes. Naturally, developers can quickly evaluate the effect of the changes and accordingly work on the errors or shortcomings to deliver a better app.

This key feature motivates many developers to pick Flutter for app projects. The hot reload feature also makes the developers utterly free from running the app again and again for evaluating the changes. Thanks to the hot reloading feature, the changes and adjustments can go hand in hand. This is more than one way that makes fixing bugs easier than ever before.

Flutter is a Developer Friendly Framework

Flutter framework offers developers excellent IDE support through popular IDE plugins like Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ or Android Studio. Moreover, Flutter mobile app development only requires Dart programming skills, and Dart is a very similar language to JavaScript, and Most developers can quickly learn c.

As a less-known programming language, Dart offers some unique features and capabilities. The language provides two distinct compilation modes, such as ahead-of-time and just-in-time. This, along with the hot reload feature, ensures incredible flexibility. The language code is highly static and stable and allows tools to carry out all the heavy lifting.

Business Logic Components (BLoC) Architecture

The coding concept of Flutter app development is the reactive programming that segregates business logic from the user interface through separate streams. The architecture is referred to as BLoC (Business Logic Components) and effectively segregates business-specific decisions from UI design decisions.

The principal value proposition of the BLoC architecture is the reactive nature and gross independence of the app logic from its UI. In other architectures, such segregation of business logic and UI is not maintained. This often results in delayed loading of the user interface.

The BLoC architecture pattern helps app projects prevent delays through separate streams, data structuring, and asynchronous methods. This ultimately ensures that certain complex UI elements like animations during screen scrolls take place more smoothly.

Access to Reusable Packages and Libraries with DartPub

Because of its Dart programming language, Flutter also allows mobile app developers access to a rich set of packages and libraries coming with the DartPub package manager. This package manager that contains a robust range of reusable packages and libraries makes the life of developers much easier.

A great thing about this package manager is that when opting for any plugin, you can see its popularity and the health and maintenance of the code for every plugin. When creating custom features for the app you can easily check the code health and whether they are getting regular updates resulting in smooth development output.

Flutter is Great for Animation in UIs

Flutter offers a full range of animation libraries for app development projects. The rich and versatile set of animation libraries will help app developers to build an improved user interface and user experience for cross-platform mobile app projects.

Flutter's array of widget libraries will also help create rich graphics and animated interfaces for the apps across iOS and Android platforms. The rich widgets library is beneficial for developers to incorporate custom animations resulting in a far seamless and visually appealing user experience.

Robust and Growing Flutter Community

Flutter had only come on the development scene in 2017. Since then, it continued to rise in popularity and became the principal contestant to React Native for cross-platform app projects. The framework continued to gain star ratings in consecutive years, resulting in a continuously increasing development community.

Today Flutter offers one of the largest developer communities for diverse app projects across the niches. Since Google supports it, it continuously gets new updates enriched with improvements and value additions. The most important thing is that community help plays a more prominent role in shaping the Flutter apps.

Since the last update of the framework, the flutter developer community could reduce the consumption of operational memory by the apps to a vast extent. The latest Flutter apps are far reduced in terms of APK sizes. In the last couple of years, the developer community has also been able to boost the performance of iOS apps by at least 50% or more. This robust and active community support plays an impactful role for Flutter app projects.

Robust Back-End with Firebase

Flutter is a front-end technology, and you can use several different technologies with Flutter for backend development. But Flutter offers out of the box access to Firebase, which is a robust and powerful backend technology from Google. Flutter apps are belonging to the same Google ecosystem work better with the Firebase backend.

As one of the leading backend development technologies, Firebase is supported by Google and offers a wide array of backend services ranging from cloud features and functions, Cloud storage, Cloud hosting, real-time databases, and several others. Thanks to Firebase, Flutter app development projects can reduce the development time and resources to a great extent for backend development.

Conclusion

Since most businesses find cross-platform development as the way to go for realizing their mobile branding objectives, Flutter stands as the most suitable technology offering ultimate cross platform development opportunities and a lot more value additions. Flutter provides more than what a modular cross platform development framework can offer. The future of app development is incomplete without Flutter.

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