Captivating Flutter App Development Benefits For Android And iOS Developers
When the App store is the bull’s eye, a dream market of every developer, what is the first preference for a platform selection for app development?
Android? iOS?…….. Or Flutter?
Yes, Flutter! Along with Android, it is also one of Google’s baby.
For the unknowns, it is an open source, multi-platform, mobile SDK that is used for building iOS and Android apps using the same source code. It is used for crafting high-quality native interfaces on iOS and Android and is free.
Native and Cross-platform, both are two schools of the thought, prominent and loud. Cross-platform apps are fueling up the app development era by offering the developers with unlimited advantages over Native approach.
Ever since its inception in 2017, the popularity is warming up and is becoming the first choice of developers for app development.
The flutter app development movement gathered around 2000 million users of Flutter apps, more than 250,000 flutter developers, and more than 3000 Flutter apps on the play store.
This new revolutionary mobile platform has gained a lot of hype inside the community, let’s see how much promising it looks as compared to iOS and Android!
Flutter Vs iOS?
Swift programming language came as a boon for the native iOS developers. The iOS apps developed by Swift are slick and fast and offered a class-apart mobile experience to the users.
But those apps missed the opportunity to target cross-platform users. Other solutions that were used to build the iOS apps showed something missing feeling, but Flutter was the complete game-changer.
It became impossible to spot the difference because it offered the same smoothness, slickness as the native app.
Let’s know more about the difference:
Single Tech Stack:
Flutter uses Dart language whose IDE and languages are different. Text editors like Atom or Sublime Text, Android Studio are used for Flutter app development. Swift, on the other hand, uses Xcode.
The components in Swift are natively developed which makes iOS app development using Swift fast. But with Flutter, there is no need to bridge the communication with native modules. So we can say, Flutter offers everything that is required for ideal iOS development.
Developer Productivity:
With native development using Swift, developers have to rebuild the app completely or the third party dependencies every time while making a change in order to see the device changes. But with Flutter, there is a hot reload option that makes it possible to see the changes instantly in real-time.
Also, the natively developed app is dependent on third-party tools like Carthage or CocoaPods whose learning curve may be steep. Whereas, Flutter has a personal dependency management tool named Pub, making it easy to learn and handle.
UI components:
The framework provided by Apple for building UI is the UIKit. It offers the developers with a wide array of gesture support including animation, document, drawing, and printing.
With Flutter, it is a bit different. Apps built with Flutter run on rendering engine and uses the Widget concept for building complex UIs.
The layouts and widgets are pixel-perfect, making Flutter a better choice over Native iOS development.
Testing Support:
For unit testing, integration and performance testing, Apple has provided XCTest. It no doubt offers a number of elements like the grouping of a test, data-driven testing, etc but also comes with shortcomings like stubbing and mocking. And it gets even harder when it comes to UI mocking.
Flutter offers a solid testing framework which facilitates unit testing at functional and UI level. With Widget testing, it is possible to run the UI test at a faster speed.
Is Flutter an ideal choice for iOS?
Flutter undoubtedly is a feature set that will skyrocket the app development process and it is the right time now to grab the advantage of this Flutter roadmap.
Flutter Vs Android?
As mentioned above, Android and Flutter belong to the same parent company. Flutter offers completely different tools as compared to native app development which can be known from the official documentation available.
The comparison between Flutter and Android can be drawn on the basis of the following key points:
Absence of Highly Repetitive Gradle build time:
The most important tool Gradle consumes a great amount of time and causes hindrances in the fast development cycles.
Flutter too requires Gradle built but not as many times as native Android does. You can build the Graddle at the initial stage of the app development and thus reduces the overall load time. This beats the load time of the native Android app development.
Same language for Backend and Layout;
Google announced the official language as Kotlin replacing Java for Android app development. It has a separate layout where developers can take references for the layout and change them at the backend.
Flutter uses a single language for UI/ backend everything which makes the development much easier for the developers.
Dart uses multiple languages:
The use of Dart framework by the Flutter has made the development process effortless by providing multiple language support, best features with continuous improvements. Java is left behind in this whole scenario and needs improvements.
High animation speed:
The surprising and most evident reason for choosing Flutter over native Android is the high animation speed of 60FPS. It has overoptimized and simplified the animation patterns.
Is Flutter an ideal choice for Android?
It is easy-to-learn- language for the mobile developers and has the capacity to solve the shortcomings of the app development process. With Flutter, you can build, Fluid animations and creative UI and speeds up the development cycle.
Final Takeaways:
- Flutter is not out of the Beta version and is now available to the app developers
- Flutter comes with constant endeavors from Google
- The Flutter community is continuously growing
- It can be used for developing higher complexity apps
There may be few drawbacks about Flutter, but with thorough documentation, it offers an easy learning curve for a novice app developer of many Flutter App development companies.
It is definitely worth entering the Flutter space soon considering the benefits it offers in comparison with the native Android and iOS app development.
