What Is Flutter? And Why You Should Use It.

Mobile Applications becoming more and more popular day by day and that’s why very creative tools/frameworks we are seeing every year in mobile app development. There are several tools and frameworks available for mobile app developers and Flutter is one of them.

What is Flutter?

?Flutter is an open-source hybrid mobile UI framework developed by Google. It was released in May 2017. Best thing about Flutter is, we can use a single codebase to develop websites and mobile apps, Again mobile apps in Android and iOS both. Flutter uses Dart language which was created by Google in October 2011 and then made several improvements in it. Dart is a typed object programming language and you can compare Dart’s syntax with javascript. Dart also mainly focuses on front-end development and that’s why flutter gives the best UI.

“Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.” - Google,?flutter.dev

Flutter consist 2 main things,

?1. An SDK - which is a collection of tools that helps in the development and compilation of your code into native machine code for Android and iOS.

?2. Framework (UI Library based on Widgets) - This is a collection of reusable UI elements such as buttons, text fields, sliders. You can use it as per your needs.

Why you should learn and use Flutter for mobile app development?

I am going to list down some of the points of flutter based on that I like it much and also using it for mobile app development (Android and iOS).

1. Easy to learn and Use: Flutter is very easy to learn. It's a modern framework and developer-friendly. It’s way simpler to develop a mobile application using Flutter, if you have used Swift, Java, Kotlin, React-Native then you will understand how Flutter is different and very easy to code. What I personally like about Flutter is, Fast compilation and Great UI, and simple to develop mobile apps for Android and iOS with very little code.
2. Speedy Compilation: Good Productivity: Flutter provides one good feature which is “Hot Reload”. You can change your code and instantly you can see the output in real-time. Only a few seconds and you can see your changes. Amazing, right? If you are a Native app developer such as Android and iOS then I feel your pain and that’s why I personally like Flutter.
3. Best for Startup MVPs: Let me tell you the reason behind this,

• It’s cheaper to develop a mobile application with Flutter because you don’t need to create and maintain two different mobile applications (Android and iOS). You just need to maintain one codebase for both apps.
• It minimizes resources that means only one developer can code and release your MVP. As it is MVP, you obviously think to save cost and time and that’s why Flutter is best.
• Flutter provides a beautiful UI as it uses Dart which mainly focuses on the front-end. Flutter provides widgets so you can use them anytime and create valuable and beautiful UI for your customers (Please find out the example below)

4. Direct Integration with Firebase: You don’t need to assign another resource for the backend as Flutter easily connects with Firebase which works as a backend for Flutter apps. It provides a collection of services such as real-time databases, cloud storage, Cloud functions, authentication, and hosting.

5. Flutter supports a variety of IDEs: You can choose from a number of integrated development environments while coding with Flutter. At first, developers were using Android Studio but then found VS Code so simple and smooth as it is lightweight. A number of developers prefer VS Code and you can select based on your preference.

6. Growing Community: Flutter has a growing community and I would like to share some places where you can check updates and ask your doubts.

• Flutter Community: A Medium publication where you can find articles, tutorials, and other several things related to Flutter.
• Awesome Flutter: A GitHub repo for a list of videos and articles related to Flutter.

Conclusion:

Indeed Flutter helps to avoid several problems to develop high-performance mobile applications in record time. To appreciate this software development kit, you need to learn it and test it in practice first.

?To learn Flutter, you can start with?Google Codelabs Website

?I hope that this introduction article has interested and motivated you. Feel free to share this article.

?If you are looking for Flutter developers or looking to build MVPs using Flutter then drop me an email?at [email protected]