5 Reasons For Choosing Flutter in 2021 !

Hello guys, If you are like me, who thinks flutter is the future of the next generations and going to really took off in 2021, and looking for some excellent online courses to learn flutter in 2021, then you have come to the right place.

Flutter, a UI software development kit by Google is known for building impressive, natively compiled apps for web, mobile, and desktop using a single codebase.

Flutter was originally an open-source project for mobile application development. Later it was extended to support platforms like web, Windows, Google Fuchsia and Linux. You might be already aware of Google’s new operating system called Fuchsia. Here, Flutter is the primary source for developing its applications. Recently, Flutter has become more competitive with React Native (Facebook) and Xamarin (Microsoft).

-Why Flutter Framework?

1. Fast Development

Flutter is faster than many other application development frameworks. With its “hot reload” feature, you can experiment, build UIs, add/remove features, test and fix bugs faster. Thus reducing the overall app development time.

2. Expressive and Flexible UI

You can really build beautiful apps in Flutter. Also, the end-user experience is similar to native apps. Flutter has a layered architecture that lets you control every pixel on the screen. Thus, customization is very simple in Flutter. With its powerful composting capabilities, you can overlay and animate graphics, text, video, and other controls without any limitations.

You’ll also find a set of widgets that deliver pixel-perfect experiences on Android and iOS. It enables the ultimate realization of Material Design. Just in case you don’t know, Material.io is Google’s initiative to build beautiful, usable products with Material Components for digital experiences. Useful resources: Material.io

3. Native Performance

Flutter’s widgets incorporate all critical platform differences such as scrolling, navigation, icons and fonts. This provides a native performance experience on both iOS and Android.

4. Dart Language

Dart programming language is developed by Google and is meant for mobile, desktop, backend and web applications. It is a client-optimized language for fast performing apps on multiple platforms.
Dart is AOT (Ahead Of Time) compiled to fast, predictable, native code, allowing writing almost all of Flutter code in Dart. This makes Flutter extremely fast and customizable. Virtually, everything (including all the widgets) can be customized.

5. Important Flutter Tools

Flutter framework supports many different tools including Android Studio and Visual Studio Code. It also provides support for building apps from the command line. Dart DevTools, which is a new debugging tool, is more flexible and allows runtime inspection. You can also view logs, debug apps and inspect widgets for Flutter App Development.

1. Widget inspector helps to visualize and explore the tree hierarchy. Flutter uses this for UI rendering.
2. Timeline view helps you to monitor your application at a frame-by-frame level. You can also identify rendering and computational work in timeline view.
3. Source-level Debugger: It lets you step through code, set breakpoints and investigate the call stack.
4. Logging View displays events from the Dart runtime, application frameworks and app-level logging events.

-Flutter Widgets

Flutter widgets are built using a modern framework that takes inspiration from React. The central idea is that you build your UI out of widgets. Widgets describe what their view should look like given their current configuration and state. When a widget’s state changes, the widget rebuilds its description, which the framework diffs against the previous description in order to determine the minimal changes needed in the underlying render tree to transition from one state to the next.

-Flutter comes with a suite of powerful basic widgets, of which the following are commonly used:

Text The Text widget lets you create a run of styled text within your application. Row, Column These flex widgets let you create flexible layouts in both the horizontal (Row) and vertical (Column) directions. The design of these objects is based on the web’s flexbox layout model. Stack Instead of being linearly oriented (either horizontally or vertically), a Stack widget lets you place widgets on top of each other in paint order. You can then use the Positioned widget on children of a Stack to position them relative to the top, right, bottom, or left edge of the stack. Stacks are based on the web’s absolute positioning layout model. Container The Container widget lets you create a rectangular visual element. A container can be decorated with a Box Decoration , such as a background, a border, or a shadow. A Container can also have margins, padding, and constraints applied to its size. In addition, a Container can be transformed in three dimensional space using a matrix.

-Flutter Advantages

1. Same UI and Business Logic in All Platforms

We, coders, know that basically any cross-platform framework provides a way to share codebase between the target platforms. But there are no such application frameworks that allow sharing both the UI code the UI itself besides Flutter.

The Flutter’s way of rendering makes the framework really stand out from the crowd eliminating any worries about the UI consistency on different platforms.

In brief, sharing the UI and business logic, which is possible with Flutter, saves time, effort and the health of the developer while not affecting the performance of the end product

2. Reduced Code Development Time

From my experience, building a usual mid-size Android app takes at least 40 seconds to get shipped onto the test device. And sometimes, it can take forever just to adjust a small visual aspect in the layout. Some of you might say, ‘Wait, but Android Studio has a layout preview for that.’ And it does. Yet, of course, there is a but: the feature is limited and doesn’t always work as expected, especially with custom views.

Flutter’s “hot reload” feature, in turn, allows seeing the applied changes almost instantly, without even losing the current application state. And this is exactly what makes Flutter app development several times faster due to the increased development speed.

3. Increased Time-to-Market Speed

This one is pretty straightforward. Flutter development framework functions quicker than its alternatives. In most cases, you can expect a Flutter app to require at least two times fewer man-hours compared to the same app developed separately for Android and iOS. The main reason is dead simple: you just don’t have to write any platform-specific code to achieve the desired visuals in your application. Any 2D-based UI can be implemented in Flutter without interacting with a native application counterpart.

Aside from that, Flutter provides a declarative API for building UI, which, in my experience, noticeably boosts the performance. This is most obvious when it comes to visual adjustments.

4. Similar to Native App Performance

Application performance is crucial for good UX. While it’s hard to tell the exact figures, it’s safe to say that Flutter application performance in most cases will be indistinguishable from the native app and even better in complex UI animation scenarios.

Why? Contrary to the approach of most cross-platform frameworks, Flutter doesn’t rely on any intermediate code representations or interpretation. Flutter application is built directly into the machine code, which eliminates any performance bugs of the interpretation process.

Eventually, you get your release application fully compiled ahead of time with Flutter.

5. Custom, Animated UI of Any Complexity Available

One of the biggest advantages of Flutter is the ability to customize anything you see on the screen, regardless of how complex it may be. While it’s usually possible to do a very custom UI on the native platforms as well, the amount of effort required differs by the order magnitude. Here’s an example of such simple yet custom UI:

6. Own Rendering Engine

Flutter allows you to do so much stuff with your apps that aren’t available on other platforms. Obviously, it requires the framework to be pretty powerful. In fact, most of the points presented above wouldn’t be possible without a high-performance cross-platform rendering engine.

Flutter uses Skia for rendering itself onto a platform-provided canvas. Because of the engine, UI built in Flutter can be launched on virtually any platform. Putting it differently, you no longer have to adjust UI to transfer it to a platform, which simplifies the development process hugely.

7. Simple Platform-Specific Logic Implementation

Besides the UI, many real-life mobile applications rely on advanced OS-level features, such as fetching GPS coordinates, Bluetooth communication, gathering sensors data, permission handling, working with credentials, etc. Many of these are available when developing a Flutter application through a ready-to-use plugin supported by Google.

Of course, there can be cases of your application relying on an OS-level feature that is not yet available as a plugin. But the team has you covered here as well! Flutter provides an easy to use way of establishing the communication between platform-native code and Dart through platform channels. This way, you can implement anything that a native app can do on a Flutter app, with just a little extra effort on the native side.

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