Flutter Pros & Cons: Mobile App Development For Owners

Are you aware of the pros and cons of flutter in mobile application development? Is Flutter a good tool for every app? Cross-platform applications are becoming very popular in iOS as well as Android systems for app owners. Therefore, a lot of assistive technologies have emerged in the market to offer better cross-platform mobile applications. Flutter is one of the latest technologies recognized by many leading companies. This popular free blogging platform on the Internet as well as Flutter is also becoming the most flexible and useful.

Are you a mobile app owner, product owner, or developer thinking about building a great mobile app, and looking for a suitable framework for which? Flutter can be worth a shot! So what are the pros and cons of Flutter, and has it proved its claims to be a skilled personal website builder? In this article, we will share you essential information about app owners, product owners and all those who want to develop mobile apps.

Also Read : Top innovative mobile app development using Flutter

Google I / O 2019 focused too much on Flutter and announced an almost overwhelming amount of news about this technology. just to name a few:

• Google has previewed the version of Flutter for the web. It is no longer called Hummingbird, it is now called Flutter Web (an example of Flutter Web is the New York Times puzzle game).
• Google has released Flutter 1.12 with several revamp changes (you can check Flutter Changelog for that notable change document).
• The latest fitter release adds support for building Chrome OS applications.
• Google released Dart 2.3 for further support and UI-as-code features.

Tim Sneth, Flutter's Product Manager, put together an aggregation of all the big news announced for Flutter at I / O 19: A Roundup of Flutter News at Google I / O.

Likewise,the rate of flutter apps being published on Google Play has continued to increase. Flutter has become a hot topic, in which case you have to make sure that you should decide to use it or not. If you need to develop or improve your mobile app, you need to know what flutter is, as well as what impact it has on professionals and risks. Let's start with the basics.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is Google's open-source mobile SDK developer framework for developing iOS and Android apps. It offers a number of widgets, tools and features that provide app owners and developers with an easy framework to create a visually appealing mobile app for the Android and iOS platforms. Flutter can create an intuitive and easy cross-platform capable of mobile app development. In this case, you will not need to develop an iOS and Android app separately. Here is all you need, to have a codebase for both platforms. Some other specialties are described below about Flutter:

• It is free and open source.
• It is based on DART such as a fast, object-oriented programming language that is easy to learn.
• Provides its own rich widgets, ready with its own high-performance rendering engine. They can be fast, beautiful and customizable.
• Flutter apps perform very well and you can easily create your own custom app designs, but can also use readily available UI elements following specific platforms guidelines).
• Flutter's architecture is based on today's very popular reactive programming (the same one built from React).
• This is becoming a serious competitor for reactive natives, but is also causing competition for native application development.

Advantages to Mobile app Owners From Flutter

Flutter works to speed up the mobile app development process, which reduces the cost of app development. And it helps your team to create a beautiful and good app UI with smooth animations. Let us understand this more deeply. We have prepared a methodical list below for you to understand, along with our Android developers Paulina Szlarska and Karol Revtnyk, who have experience working with Flutter. From the app owner's point of view, the important advantages are as follows:

1. Faster Code Writing

For developers, flutter can be defined by faster and more dynamic mobile app development. We can make code changes and see them directly in the app! This is the so-called hot reload stuff, which usually helps teams add features, fix bugs and use faster, usually in just seconds. This is the one thing about Flutter that is loved by every top Flutter app development team.

Hot reload is very comfortable in developer-designer collaboration when we want to improve or use the look of an app and examine the effect on the spot. In other words, with Flutter, your designer or tester can work closely with a developer on the UI, which can lead to changes.

Most types of code changes are hot reloaded. But there is a list of changes that require a complete restart. Whereas in case of basic application development the project needs to be re-created and it takes a lot of time. You have to wait for every single change, sometimes, even for several minutes.

Also Read : What is Flutter and its pros and risk for app owners ?

2. Low Test

If you have only one app to use 2 platforms, this means less testing is required. The quality assurance process can be speeded up. Due to a codebase, developers write automated tests only once. What's more, quality assurance experts have less to work with, as they have only one app to check. Of course, if there are some differences in your app, they need to be tested on both platforms.

3. Code for 2 Platforms

Developers create ready for your 2 apps by writing just one codebase, which covers both Android and iOS platforms in one. Flutter does not depend on the platform, as it has its own widgets and designs. This means that you use the same app on two platforms. Still what is important is if you want to separate your apps which is possible.

4. Designs liked by Users

Flutter is primarily designed to make your widgets or to customize or improve existing widgets or to make them easier to use. Here you can browse Flutter's catalog of widgets and views, for example, the Content Design Widget and the Cupertino Widget.

5. Fast app

Flutter apps work in a smooth and fast manner without hanging and cutting while vibrating. If you want to understand why and how it works in technical terms, then read this article. Also, check out this complete and amazing page in the Flutter documentation that explains about the best practices for mobile app performance.

6. Right for MVP

Do you need MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to show your app to your investors? Flutter would be a perfect choice, especially if you have very little cost as well as time also.

7. Same App UI for older devices

Your new app will look the same on older versions of Android and iOS systems. There is no additional or extra cost to support older devices. Flutter is used on Android Jelly Bean or newer tactics, as well as iOS 8 or newer devices.

Mobile App Owners have risk from Flutter Cons

Library Support

Google support for Flutter is impressive, and there are many supporting libraries with functionalities that are ready to be implemented. But Flutter is still new and every functionality you need can be found in these libraries. This means that your developers will need to build them on their own, which can be very time consuming.

However, we can expect that support for flutter is improving at a rapid pace. What's more, the Flutter team is actively involved in repeatedly resolving Flutter users and responding to requested issues.

Support continuous unity

 For now, Flutter is not widely supported by CI platforms such as Travis or Jenkins. Therefore, to achieve automated building, testing and deployment, your development team needs to use and maintain such custom scripts. There is a new CI / CD system for Flutter applications called Kodamic which was announced in Flutter Live 2018. Worth to mention: One of our team members, Karol, is constantly working on Flutter. The final release added the possibility of creating an appbundle for the Android release.

Is Flutter right for every sort of Mobile App?

There are some cases when it is worth considering whether flutter would be a reasonable solution:

Progressive Web Apps and Instant Apps

They need to be small and Flutter applications - even optimized - are larger than native ones. The overhead varies from just a few 20 megabytes, depending on whether it is a release or development build. Note that Google allows the maximum number of apps. 10 MB

Apps that communicate with any hardware via Bluetooth. If you want to develop an app with such features and use Flutter. Develop these features separately for iOS and Android and then add them to the main Flutter app using platform channels. In this case, it is difficult to say if this will save you time, if you develop two 100% native applications.

As we can see on the FlutterBlue repository on Github, there are over 200 open issues and 36 pending pull requests. These numbers suggest that this library may require more maintenance and development. In the case of technologies such as Flutter, which are rapidly improving, frequent plugin updates are required and have been recently updated.

How important is this? We don't know, because the technology is still very low, but in the case of iOS apps, if a library is maintained for six months (it's not a lot of time), we stay away from it, and there is a plugin for Flutter. Basically a library for Android and iOS implements similar features. If your app requires an advanced Bluetooth feature, then FlutterBlue may not be enough.

Accordingly, FlutterBlue is not mature enough to be used in a commercial product, but we can make changes with promising potential in it. For now, a less risky option would be to choose native development for apps communicating with any hardware viaBLE - especially if you would need some advanced BLE functionalities.

Apps Seeking Rare, little-known Native Libraries

If in your application development, you expect to use a specific and rare native library and they are not already in Flutter's repository, it may still be possible but it will be complicated. Developers have to implement custom platform channels themselves. This is different for both Android and iOS and may take the same amount of time.

Wrapping Up

We'll help you get an overview of the pros and cons of the flutter framework. Choosing the right framework requires a lot of research about all the technology of that particular framework. Since Flutter has more advantages and most importantly it saves time and cost required for the development process, you can easily opt for it. In addition, there are many commercial giants currently using applications developed by Flutter. You can review them and compare their functioning with other applications.

Above all, you need to keep in mind what an end-user will experience when a mobile application is built using the Flutter framework. In addition to the flutter risks, they are able to do many more benefits for business and development teams in many ways. This is a great chance to create beautiful, high-performance and excellent mobile applications that fit your custom needs and requirements. Thus it can be considered worthy of consideration for flutter, especially if you want to create an app for both iOS and Android.