Pros and Cons of Flutter for Mobile App Development

Article Summary

iOS and Android are the major platforms for mobile app development, and creating cross-platform products has been appealing for both creators and app owners. Thus as a result technologies have emerged to establish cross-platform mobile applications. They do not require a runtime module or a browser. Utilizing the same codebase, it is yet possible to create web apps for browsers as well as native programs for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

This blog talks over the advantages and disadvantages of one of the extraordinary technologies Flutter - a new open source for creating mobile applications.

According to a recent survey, Flutter stands to be the most popular choice for developing Cross-platform applications and holds a market share of 42 percent.

Back in the days of Objective C/Swift and Java/Kotlin as primary languages for mobile development, creating apps was costly. You had to work on separate apps, which meant doing the work twice which was a lot of hassle and a lengthy process including a huge amount of investment as well. Then came an idea of a unique app development software Flutter.

Flutter is an open-source and free technology that uses Dart language (a programming language uniquely used by flutter) that takes care of app widgets, gestures, animations, illustrations, and materials for app development. It provides cross-platform development which means one codebase for both Android and IOS. Isn't it super cool?

It earlier started as a startup with tremendous success; it was taken over by Google and developed in the year 2017.

Flutter app natively compiled to:

Flutter’s hot reload is the characteristic that enables it to deliver prompt execution. With it, the application gets assembled using the arm C/C++ library, facilitates the team to test further and try out new elements as well as cuts down on the bug-fixing time.

Dart language is a programming language uniquely used by Flutter. It is an object-oriented programming feature that makes the app development process super scalable and convenient for creating even complex applications.

With a single code base flutter programs Simultaneously in both android as well as iOS making it super convenient and time-saving as well as hassle-free for both creators and well as users.

Flutter can easily incorporate third-party integrations and APIs. Through the third-party integration, you can access native features such as camera and geolocation with flutter. It cuts down the time and makes it user-friendly.

But where the best comes, there are always a few Pitfalls to it. Let's have a closer look at the advantages and disadvantages of Flutter.

Through incredible growth, Flutter has become the best among the app developers community so let's have a look over a few major advantages of Flutter.

Gone are the days when you have to scribble down long codes individually for Android and iOS. Flutter reusability allows you to write a single codebase for both Android and iOS and cuts down a lot of your time, effort, and money as well. It allows you to launch your mobile app rapidly.

Flutter uses the Skia Graphic library which consists C++ engine which has all the protocols, compositions, and channels. It redraws a UI every time a view changes which provides a quick and smooth app development experience.

Its hot reload feature makes the app development process much quicker. With a flutter, you do not have to refresh the application to see the changes you made in the codebase. It does the work in such a quick manner and makes the changes happen within a period and makes your application much quicker. Thus, you can experiment more with the code and fix bugs.

With its single codebase programming feature for both android as well as iOS it saves a lot of time for developers and makes it super friendly for the pockets as it saves a lot of manpower as well as reduces coding costs thus a lot of time and money can be diverted in different areas like bug fixing, marketing, etc.

Developers are given major control over how they want the layout of their application to be and develop a successful application in less time. As soon as the developer makes the changes to UI and the designer does the modification can immediately be seen in the app development process.

One of the best parts of flutter is it uses dart language which is one of the simplest programming languages with extraordinary speed and performance.

Is Flutter all about pros, though? Not quite. We tested it out in practice to see whether that’s the case. Here’s what cons we found:

The apps made with Flutter tend to be weighted ones. They take comparatively more time to update or download and take large storage on your device. Many older devices and unable to store additional apps without users.

Third-Party libraries are packages that have a crucial effect on software development and enable a few major Features for developers. However, since Flutter is still naive in this field, it’s not manageable to get at such free packages and libraries. The tool is yet in the developing stage and improving.

Flutter uses the Dart software programming language.it carries both its benefits and drawbacks. It isn't as great as other programming languages. Not many freshers would be able to get friendly with it.

Updating programming requirements in OS (operating systems) requires updating the Flutter widget model. Since the modules are incorporated as fixed components in the program, the latter must also be recompiled and reinstalled on the devices.

As you know Flutter is developed by Google. That's the reason developers are eager about its performance with iOS. Building android apps on Flutter is tremendously successful as it fixes the bugs but iPhone settings were defined on the framework to simplify the Cupertino widgets. But the iOS 10 and iOS 11 components were updated later and released for a span.

So coming to an end here we have covered all the major advantages and disadvantages of Flutter as a mobile app development software and thus it would be wise to include that there are more advantages to It than disadvantages.

Flutter is worth considering because of its super unique features and high-performance attributes which make the task super-efficient, cost-friendly, and less hassle because of its single code base feature for android and iOS.

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