Why Is Flutter a Good Choice for Cross-Platform Projects?

As businesses seek faster, cheaper, and simpler ways to bring their products to market, industry leaders must develop well-thought-out production plans using the right tools. Multi-platform production can be a significant bottleneck for start-ups needing synchronized app development. Managing multiple teams and cross-platform development increases expenses, depleting cash reserves and shortening project timelines.

Therefore, it is crucial for business owners to find a cross-platform framework that enables a unified team to build a multi-platform product from a single codebase. Whether targeting mobile, web, or desktop, businesses can avoid the need to assign separate teams for different platforms.

Flutter is a tool that accelerates product development and synchronizes release schedules, helping to expand your customer base and boost profit margins.

For aspiring industry leaders, Flutter is particularly beneficial. As mobile and desktop technology become increasingly interconnected, cross-platform support is essential for any new project.

Reason 1: Smooth cross-platform app development

Flutter's popularity has skyrocketed primarily because its framework is platform-agnostic.

The two leading mobile OS platforms are Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Native app projects are primarily written in the language used by the OS. For example, iOS applications use Swift and Objective-C, while native code for Android are Java or Kotlin.

While this allows for a UI that matches the user experience with that of the OS, the nature of developing separate native applications requires organizations to create multiple codebases for each device with its own version of the app.

And so long as the editor can support the Dart language, the Flutter framework is also compatible with the vast majority of major editors and IDEs, including Android Studio, IntelliJ IDEAS, and VS Code.

Flutter's focus on offering an excellent user experience in an easy-to-learn package makes collaboration more accessible, no matter who you are or your involved stage in the production process.

Reason 2: Performance

The second reason many companies opt for Flutter is its speed and performance. So long as you follow their best practices (as highlighted heavily in their documentation), you have absolutely nothing to worry about.

How fast is Flutter?

Recent findings from inVerita have shown just how fast the Flutter engine can be compared to other cross-platform frameworks and even native development languages.

According to inVerita, Flutter compiled 65% faster for the Gauss-Legendre and Borwein Algoroth CPU-intensive tests for iOS and Android. Collecting as quickly as native development languages like Swift and Objective-C, Flutter presents a legitimate alternative for native apps. Not all cross-platform apps are slow; Flutter beats out Swift in certain areas.

There are three ways Flutter achieves faster performance:

• Flutter's DevTools
• Skia
• The Dart language

Flutter's DevTools provide profiling, display code coverage, and everyone's favorite performance overlay. Flutter's performance overlay displays statistics for frames rendered and their millisecond increments. Ideally, each frame is created and displayed within 1/60th of a second to display 60 frames per second.

Reason 3: Popularity

All this has helped Flutter rise to the top of app-making popularity, as over two million developers have used Flutter in the last three years. It was created by Google in 2015 and officially launched in 2018. Since then, the Flutter app development has quickly became the toolkit of choice for many developers, surpassing React Native to become the number one mobile app development framework.

Statista's research has shown that since its release, Flutter's usage rate amongst software developers has only increased from 30% in 2019 to 42% in 2021, taking the top spot away from React Native for the first time in 3 years.

At the moment, There are over 500000 flutter based applications on the Play Store alone. With over 11 billion app downloads across operating systems, Flutter applications now constitutes 3.55% of the flutter mobile apps and 8.33% of the new apps involved.

Develop a cross-platform app with Flutter

The above points provide insight into Flutter's growing popularity and the businesses’ decision to switch onto this framework. Building an app in Flutter can be smooth, seamless, and cost-effective. Aa Flutter decreases the amount of coding, the overall cost is lower than when building separate native apps, where the code needs to be written twice. Besides the costs, apps built in Flutter perform similarly to native apps.