Reasons Why Flutter Is The Best Mobile SDK

Mohamed Soufan

17 Apr 2024 — 4 min read

Our mobile devices and software, empowered by platforms like Flutter, have taken over our lives. There are already more than six billion smartphone users worldwide. Furthermore, nearly five million mobile applications, many of which are developed using Flutter, are accessible for download from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. Despite the fact that the mobile application market, with Flutter at the forefront, is becoming increasingly competitive, this is where most companies and developers are concentrating their efforts.

As a result, it is natural for mobile app developers to seek for simpler, faster, and less expensive ways to get their products to market. Effective development tools are critical in this process. The tools that developers employ, from programming languages to app frameworks to software development kits, impact how quickly they can get a product in front of customers.

Flutter. What is it?

Flutter is Google’s free and open-source software development kit (SDK) for developing cross-platform mobile applications. It allows developers to create high-performance, scalable applications with appealing and functional user interfaces for Android or iOS using a single platform-agnostic codebase. It is based on a collection of pre-made widgets that allow developers to quickly launch their own mobile applications.

It was created by Google in 2015 and officially launched in 2018, has quickly become the toolkit of choice for developers. It has now beaten React Native to become the number one mobile app development framework, according to Statista.

How Flutter Works

It’s a multi-layered solution that includes the framework, engine, and platform-specific embedders. Google’s Dart object-oriented programming language is used to create Flutter applications. The Flutter engine is mostly written in C/C++. And the Skia library serves as the foundation for Flutter’s graphics capabilities.

Many of Flutter’s performance advantages are built on Dart. It provides support for both ahead-of-time (AOT) and just-in-time (JIT) compilation. AOT compiled code into lower-level native code, resulting in apps that start up faster and perform better. JIT enables Flutter’s hot reload feature (explained further below), which shortens development time. Dart now compiles directly to native ARM or Intel x64 code, reducing performance differences between Flutter apps and native applications that rely on runtime intermediate code interpretations. Its architecture also makes it easy to add functionality or accommodate new users, making it highly extendable and scalable.

Why Developers Love Flutter?

1. It’s Fast and Simple

It includes a variety of features that make cross-platform mobile app development easier and faster. The ability to rely on a single codebase and UI engine for cross-platform development, perhaps most obviously, decreases the effort required to generate versions of an application for both Android and iOS.

The rich widget library also provides developers with fast access to pre-made functionality, decreasing total writing effort.

Reduced coding time equals lower development costs.

Its hot reload functionality is one of the most essential advantages for saving development time. Hot reload, which relies on JIT compilation, accelerates the implementation of code changes. Flutter inserts code updates into a running Dart VM without affecting preserved states during hot reload. Because the app code is not completely recompiled, hot reload displays the consequences of code updates more immediately. Hot reload enables developers to see the effect of changes in real-time without affecting the application’s current state. As a result, developers can test features and versions more quickly, as well as correct errors.

I think it’s a fantastic solution for startups with low resources thanks to its efficiency. A startup, for example, may have already spent at least $75 per hour on a web designer and will be looking at comparable or greater prices for application developers. Flutter is an effective development solution for cost-conscious enterprises, as it reduces development time and accelerates product release.

2. It’s Easy To Use

Whether you have much coding experience or not, it is straightforward to learn. Developers that frequently deal with other languages such as Java, Python, C#, or other object-oriented languages will find it easy to include Dart into their toolboxes because Dart is structurally and syntactically similar to those languages. Furthermore, for people with less development knowledge, its rich widget library makes it simple to build applications without writing much code.

It also comes with full documentation. In addition to the basic reference handbook, the Flutter support materials include a variety of example apps, a “cookbook” that shows developers how to do typical tasks, and even a suggestion for a training camp.

3. Flutter Offers A Unique User Experience

To be genuinely effective, mobile apps must have well-designed, appealing, and functioning user interfaces. And it excels at providing an excellent user experience. The built-in widget collection in Flutter is focused on delivering high-performance, visually appealing application parts. It makes it almost effortless to create UIs ranging from the most basic to more complicated interfaces with numerous components.

Apps built with Flutter are compiled directly into native code, so no intermediate code interpretation stages are required. In comparison to other cross-platform development applications, such as React Native, which require bridges between their code and native parts, Flutter avoids unnecessary processing stages, making it substantially faster.

4. Google’s Firebase Backend

Developers must be able to easily add functionality or expand an application’s user base without breaking it.

Flutter’s backend is powered by Google’s Firebase application, which was designed for scalability.

Firebase provides real-time database updates, which helps to ensure that data syncs between clients as quickly as possible. Firebase additionally optimizes and limits the number of updates required for syncing, thus adding users of functionality has no detrimental impact on performance.