Flutter App Development – Pro’s and Con’s
Developed by Google, Flutter is an SDK for developing mobile applications. The new open-source technology helps in creating native Android and iOS application with a single codebase. The SDK includes inbuilt widgets, command-line tools, testing and integrating API’s, and rendering engine.
Flutter uses DART – an object-oriented language, which discernibly accelerates the application startup time. Using DART, Flutter doesn’t need to call to OEM (original equipment manufacturer), since it utilizes its own.
Google engineers have tirelessly worked on various aspects of the SDK to improve performance and minimize the bugs in the SDK.
Top Advantages of Flutter App Development:
Flutter has a lot of advantages that are attracting coders worldwide to take a look into the SDK to develop their Android and iOS applications.
Hot reload
With the hot reload feature developers can see all the changes made to the code instantly. It helps the teams to add new features quickly, fix bugs, and experiment in real-time.
Cross-platform development
With cross-platform development, developers can write code just once and use that one codebase for two applications.
Developing MVP
If you want to showcase your product as soon as possible, building an application using Flutter makes sense. With a minimal turn around time, investors or clients will have a clear idea of how your MVP looks.
Less code
The programming language of Flutter is Dart. Dart is object-oriented and strongly typed. For improving the development workflow, DART uses both
- Ahead-of-Time, or AOT, compilation
- Just-in-Time, or JIT, compilation
With Dart, iOS and Android apps share 100% of the code between them.
Widgets
Flutter assumes everything is a widget. Hence, widgets are used to develop entire screens and even for the app itself. Using the widgets speeds up the development process.
Access to native features
Some platform-specific functions like camera and geolocation require access to native features. Flutter gives the feel of developing these functions on the native platform. One can reuse the existing Java, Swift, and Objective-C code to access native features and SDKs on iOS and Android.
Official support
Since Flutter is Google’s initiative, there’s an excellent support for the SDK. A set of application developers are around to resolve issues and contribute to the growth of this framework.
Quick Set-up
With an easy to set up process, it is easy to start coding using Flutter on low-end machines. Also, it doesn’t require powerful machines.
Cons
Like any other SDK development kit, Flutter has its own set of disadvantages.
Mobile-only
Flutter caters to mobile apps only. So developers looking for flexibility may not opt for the SDK given the fact it is less flexible.
Limited libraries
Since the framework is relatively new, all the libraries aren’t available. Building these time-consuming libraries from scratch will be an additional burden on the developers when the turn around time is limited.
Continuous Integration
Though there are ready-made Flutter solutions for most popular CI platforms, you need to set up the toolkit for these kinds of platforms.
Limited TV support
Flutter offers no support for Android TV and Apple TV.
Platform Specific Look and Feel
In Flutter, one can check which platform the app is running and render different components on the screen. But achieving the native look and feel may not be everyone’s cup of tea.
Native SDK Knowledge
In every Flutter project, you will need to hire a mobile application developer experienced with native development. But if you consider creating hire developers in India, you have to keep in mind that Flutter developer must be open-minded for both platforms.
