Five reasons why we use Flutter for mobile development
First, let's describe Flutter for those who are not familiar with it.
“Flutter is an open source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase.”
And also:
“It is used to develop cross-platform applications for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows, Google Fuchsia, and the web from a single codebase.”
In layman's terms, Flutter gives us the tools to quickly and easily develop mobile and web applications using a single codebase. In other words, coding the project once we can have an Android application, iOS (Apple) application, and a fully functional web application.
Let’s get a bit more in-depth for those who might be interested and list the top 5 reasons we believe Flutter is great for development.
1- One codebase, multiple platforms
As mentioned above, using a single codebase (writing the code only once) we are able to build an application for different platforms (Android, iOS, and Web). This approach literally saves us 50% of our time (and of course our client’s money) since we code the app only once and then ship it for both iOS and Android (we don’t prefer to use Flutter for building web applications) at the same time.
2- Flutter is open-source
All the Flutter codebase is publicly available on GitHub for anyone to see, use, and contribute to it. Of course, Flutter has behind some of the best software engineers that work daily on it, but still, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of the community. These thousands of developers, if not millions, contribute to the Flutter project, by opening bugs, writing Flutter packages etc.
3- It’s all about widgets
Without getting too deep into this part, since it’s mostly technical stuff, we would like to point out that building an application with Flutter is so much pleasure to work with, the learning curve feels natural and the whole development process goes smoothly. Features like Hot-reload (the ability to refresh the app without loading the full code) make our job so much easier and more productive to work.
4- Flutter is backed by Google
And this translates to peace of mind for us developers and for our projects running with it, since we know that Flutter is in good hands, and its life will be long and prosperous. Just for your reference, Flutter was acquired by Google in October 2013 for US$40 million.
5- Flutter is developed using the Dart Language
For those who want to get into the technical parts, Dart is a “Client-optimized language for fast apps on any platform”. Being a strongly-typed language, Dart helps us developers to make fewer mistakes since the code is validated before runtime (at the moment it is written). Also, just like Flutter, Dart is free and open source and owned by Google.
