What is Flutter and Why You Should Learn it in 2020

This year, mobile applications continued to become more and more popular. Fortunately, there are many programming tools available to developers who want to create them. Among these tools, there is Flutter, which has distinguished itself lately.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is a free and open-source mobile UI framework created by Google and released in May 2017. In a few words, it allows you to create a native mobile application with only one codebase. This means that you can use one programming language and one codebase to create two different apps (for iOS and Android).

Flutter consists of two important parts:

• An SDK (Software Development Kit): A collection of tools that are going to help you develop your applications. This includes tools to compile your code into native machine code (code for iOS and Android).
• A Framework (UI Library based on widgets): A collection of reusable UI elements (buttons, text inputs, sliders, and so on) that you can personalize for your own needs.

To develop with Flutter, you will use a programming language called Dart. The language was created by Google in October 2011, but it has improved a lot over these past years.

Dart focuses on front-end development, and you can use it to create mobile and web applications.

If you know a bit of programming, Dart is a typed object programming language. You can compare Dart's syntax to JavaScript.

Why Flutter?

1. Fast development

Flutter engineered for high development velocity. Stateful hot reload allows you to change your code and see it come to life is less than a second without losing the state of the app. Flutter also ships with a rich set of customizable widgets, all built from modem reactive framework.

2. Expressive + Flexible UI

Flutter moves to a widget, rendering, animation and gestures into this framework to give you to complete control over every pixel on the screen. It means you have the flexibility to build a custom design.

3. Native apps for Android and IOS

Flutter apps follow platform conventions and interface details such as scrolling, navigation, icons, fonts, etc. That why apps built with Flutter features on both of the APPSTORE and GOOGLE PLAY STORE.

4. Hot Reload

In flutter, very save on the app and just as you do on the web just hit a refresh and your codes also refresh. Imaging that Facebook SDK it would be so humongous if it would have been designing android and you hit a recompile. So many things to have recompile and it would take probably days. Unmistakably, Hot reloading is tech which is kind of necessary when your applications or product goes like incense crazy like Facebook.

5. High Performance

Flutter doesn’t require a Javascript bridge and the speed is much faster.

6. Using Dart as a Programming Language

Dart is an object-oriented programming language that which used for writing mobile application code for Flutter and which contributes to the efficiency and effectiveness of app development flow. It is a comfortable language and uses a lot of CSS parts as well. Dart uses for generational garbage collection which helps in creating frames for short-lived objects. It also helps to allocate the objects with a single pointer bump to avoid UI jank and shutter.

7. Reduce the Third Parties

When using flutter, you can get complete IOS experience or Android Experience. So they are reducing the Third parties.

8. API. The Flutter API is very consistent

AnimationBuilder, FutureBuilder, StreamBuilder,…Once you understand them you have no limit. Anything is a widget. A button can use as a screen, a full page used as a button with animation and transformation.

9. The customizable kit of Widgets

Flutter has built with a rich and customizable set of widgets for Android, IOS and Material Design. The collaboration between Flutter and Google’s material design has rendered and easily create powerful UI experience. This help to create smooth, crisp and refined app experience as are available with a native app.

Ideal for startup MVPs

If you want to show your product to investors as soon as possible, Flutter is a good choice.

Here are my top 4 reasons to use it for your MVP:

• It’s cheaper to develop a mobile application with Flutter because you don’t need to create and maintain two mobile apps (one for iOS and one for Android).
• One developer is all you need to create your MVP.
• It’s performant – you won't notice the difference between a native application and a Flutter app.
• It’s beautiful – you can easily use widgets provided by Flutter and personalize it to create a valuable UI for your customers (you can find examples of applications made with Flutter below).

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