Google Flutter: A New Approach to Mobile App Development

Google is many things and being a search engine is one of the things. Yes, only a part of Google works on Search engine part. There are other counter-parts where Google excels and development is one of those. In May 2017, Google releases Alpha. The target of this release was Android, iOS, and Google Fuchsia. The very first version of Flutter was known as “Sky” which was released at the 2015 Dart Developer summit which can render 120 frames per second.

The rendering capacity of the framework shows how capable this new tech is. In later releases, it improves significantly and with the latest update on June 2018, Google simply nailed it.

So, how can it be leveraged for cross-platform mobile development?

We will discuss that here. In this post, we will learn all we can about Google Flutter is cross-platform mobile development framework. So, without any further ado, let’s get you started.

Google’s Flutter: An Introduction

Flutter is an open source mobile app development framework by Google which is cross-platform friendly. With Flutter app development on your side, you can easily create high-performing and interactive apps for Android and iOS platforms from the single code base. As I mentioned above, this framework is also the development platform for Google’s next operating system Fuchsia.

In the market with so many other frameworks, why you should use it? You must be baffling with this question!!! Allow me to quench your curiosity with the next section which presents,

Why Should You Use Google’s Flutter?

When we talk about cross-platform frameworks, he usually follows one of these approaches,

• They perceive the application as if they were a website and wrap the web view into a native applications.
• They will wrap the native controls and mold them with a cross-platform construct.

However, Flutter goes with a different approach from other cross-platform mobile development frameworks When you develop a mobile with Flutter, it provides you with an engine with a portable runtime to host the application. Flutter is built on the Skia graphics library which provides widgets that are rendered.

With this approach, the native cross-platform mobile development becomes flexible with smooth performance. Flutter comes with a rich widget library which makes it a highly rich platform to work with. To be honest, Google Flutter is the closest thing that enables cross-platform mobile developers to develop Google apps with little to no compromises.

How Google Flutter Was Developed?

The answer to this question lies in the arms of Dart which is a programming language developed by Google. It is (Dart) an object-oriented language which supports elements that are ahead of the timeline. Not just that, it also handles well the current elements of development. It is very well suited for building native applications.

The Dart language offers many features such as,

• Garbage Collection
• Async-await
• Strong typing
• Rich standard library like generics

Dart is also can be easily compiled with JavaScript. When combined with Google Flutter, it can be shared with the mobile and web platforms.

My Thoughts on Google Flutter So Far

When you are learning Flutter mobile app development, there are few things you must keep in mind,

• The support, google flutter developer’s experience, and the spirit of community is mind-boggling. Because of the enthusiasm for Flutter the Google groups and the blog posts are of very high quality. Google engineers are out of their league to answer questions on groups of Google. The documentation is whimsical. As Flutter is based on Dart language, the libraries are far too stable.
• As Dart is pretty new in the market, the third party libraries are less available. More than 95% of features are there for you. However, there are some third-party integrations with good analytics which cannot be handled alone with HTTP wrapper. On the overall scale, Google flutter is an ultimate cross-platform mobile development framework.
• The flutter framework is heavily comprised of material design widgets. It helps the mobile developers to crank out simple yet professional mobile apps. Flutter does indeed provide its own set of iOS widgets, but these still have a way to go in terms of comprehensiveness.
• Writing cross-platform apps will throw more design challenges your way but this hasn’t really anything to do with flutter itself but more to do with getting into development for multiple platforms. When you plan out a Flutter app, make sure you have a good designer and a nice custom UI mocked up or be ready to write your Flutter app so that your code conditionally uses either Material Design or Cupertino widgets.
• Flutter rocks!!! It’s not perfect by any means, but in my own opinion, the learning curve, ease of use, tools available make it by far a nicer experience than other mobile frameworks.

Final Remarks

As we know Google Flutter is in the beta version, even there it is very useful to cross-platform mobile app developers. Flutter can bring development pleasure to you with its hot reloading and brilliant tooling. A flutter developer can easily target Fuchsia along with Android and iOS operating system. With the growing community, it is the right time for the developers and businesses to jump in the platform.

With these final words, Cheerio Fellas!!! Let me know your valuable opinion on Google Flutter via comments.