Flutter: The Perfect Fit For 2K22 Mobile App Development
I’ve been spinning my head around how great the Flutter IDE is. So, I watched a few YouTube videos and decided to try to see how different Flutter is from other cross-platform mobile app development frameworks such as React Native, Xamarin, etc., and learn something new.
Remember, learning is the only thing that never exhausts our minds, provided you are genuinely learning!
So, let’s see what we’ll cover in this article -
- What is Flutter IDE and its History?
- Why Flutter, and what makes it the best choice among Devs?
- Benefits of using Flutter for mobile app development?
- Strategy and Roadmap for Flutter in 2022
- What’s new in Flutter 2.10.3?
- When is Flutter coming for Windows?
What is Flutter IDE and its History?
If I define what Flutter is — you probably won’t be conveyed!! So, here is how Flutter’s page describes it -
“Flutter is an open-source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase.”
That is,
“Flutter is Google’s widget-based UI toolkit or an open-sourced cross-platform portable toolkit to create software applications using the same copy of your code.”
The job of Flutter IDE is to focus on making app development faster, more accessible, and highly productive while allowing a development team to be more creative. If you want the same code to create mobile apps for both iOS and Android, there is no IDE better than Flutter.
Flutter help transform the app development process to a whole new level — from building, testing, and deploying beautiful web, mobile, and desktop apps to embedded apps using a single codebase. That’s powerful! Because, as a developer, you don’t like to write the same logic for different platforms — mostly iOS & Android.
Critical features of Flutter -
- Hot reload,
- Excellent performance,
- A vast widget catalog and support for Firebase, and
- a solid community to meet objectives on time.
Note: If you’re looking for the latest on Flutter IDE, you can find them here — Hot Fixes to the Stable Channel.
Moreover, your code on Flutter compiles to ARM (an advanced reduced instruction set computer (RISC) machine), or machine code for Intel processor and as well as JavaScript for fast performance on any computing device (try it in Dart Pad here).
Talking about Flutter’s history, the tech giant Google launched its 1st stable version on Dec. 4, 2018, at a Live event. After its successful acceptance, Google again released Flutter 1.12 at an interactive event on Dec. 11, 2019.
And on May 6, 2020, Google released Flutter 1.17.0 with the Dart SDK (software development kit ) version 2.8 while adding support for the Metal API. The metal API and new material widgets and network tracking development tools improved its performance for iOS devices by approx — 60%. And on Mar. 3 2021, Google released Flutter 2 at an online Flutter Engage event.
Recently, Google released Flutter 2.10.3 with its stable version. And what’s inside Flutter 2.10.3 is explained later in this article. So, keep scrolling down.
Why Flutter, and what makes it the best choice among Devs?
Google’s Flutter has many features, but two of them — Hot Reload and Single Minimal Codebase — make it the best choice for app development in the global dev community. That’s why developers worldwide chose Flutter for mobile app development, and it’s the main reason Flutter continues to be at the top of the charts of app development frameworks out there.
Benefits of using Flutter for mobile app development
Let’s discuss what the benefits of incorporating Flutter for your development team at your business organization are -
- The Flutter framework provides excellent services and high-quality product development at low costs and inputs.
- Flutter provides superb usability and speed in app development with the Hot Reload ⟳ feature. This functionality help devs to alter their code on simulators, emulators, or real devices and see real-time changes. Developers love it!
- The Single Codebase makes development go faster for both iOS and Android apps. No need to write the code for different platforms. It cuts down the app development costs and speeds up the time to market your product.
- No bridge is needed to connect among native modules as native components are available by default in Flutter. And it is to be noted that “Bridge typically causes performance issues.”
- Flutter app performance is simple, better for developers, and equivalent to native real-time applications.
And last but not least!
“There is no need to restart Flutter like Microsoft Visual Studio since Flutter runs live like React Native. Hot fills make building UIs, adding features, and bug fixing simpler than ever”.
The other benefits of using Flutter are -
- Support for 2D mobile app development.
- Full support for stock-platform app development.
- Exquisite and creative designs using its widgets and interactive UI.
- Support for the camera, network, storage, location, and more.
Strategy and Roadmap for Flutter in 2022
Product teams typically get busy setting up their goals and areas to focus on for upcoming times. And they put their whole selves into guarding the commercially sensitive info that gives them a competitive advantage. But for an open-source project like developing apps with Flutter, transparency is a virtue since it allows you and your dev team to have direction, set trust for the future, and make clear plans for better investments.
In the light of transparency and open contributions, Flutter’s progress and worldwide fame mainly come from many contributors outside and inside Google (the most extensive paid sponsor, but not the only one). Besides Google, many individuals have contributed their labor and intellectual property. Large corporations such as Canonical, ByteDance, Microsoft, and Alibaba are the top contributors.
Apart from that, Sony is pushing for Embedded Linux (investments from Toyota and other automotive companies) — using Flutter in Automotive Grade Linux. And the work that Samsung and others are doing to port Flutter to Tizen.
Thus, because of these high-grade tens of thousands of projects from developers inside and outside of Google, strategies will probably evolve as businesses and tech giants engage with Flutter Dev Community and as priorities and approaches of enterprises change.
What’s new in Flutter 2.10.3?
Earlier in this article, I mentioned that I would be talking about the latest Flutter release. Well! Let’s get started.
But before going all kumbaya about the new version of Flutter, I recommend you read — what’s new in Flutter 2.10 by Chriss Sells here on Medium.
But, the good news is that nothing much has changed since Flutter’s 2.10.3 version was released on 2nd March of this year. And the Fossies’ Archives simply says -
“The “Flutter” source code changed by about 0.01% and still consists of 6023 regular files and 1864 directories.”
When is Flutter coming for Windows?
In Feb. 2022, Flutter extended its support to Windows OS. Now, developers can build high-quality Windows apps that run on the Web app and mobile phones.
It is also the right time to hit the market since Windows 11 supports Android and Linux apps. Hence, now Flutter app devs have much comfort and ease in creating apps using a single codebase for various platforms.
Moreover, if you want stable, production-quality support for building Windows apps, follow this link — Flutter 2.10 for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and Chrome OS, and install the suitable version for your machine-OS combination.
And if you’re looking for the latest features, bug fixes, and performance improvements, find them in the separate blog post by Tim Sneath, product manager of Flutter.
I hope you enjoyed this little piece of info curated for you! I’m excited and would be humbled to have your feedback so that I can provide you with the information you’re searching for. And do let me know what projects you are working on using Flutter and how it is better than React Native, Xamarin, etc., and helping you as an individual or your dev team — hoping to see unique and hybrid apps!