According to Statista’s survey from last year, 42% of software developers surveyed chose ReactJS as their preferable cross-platform mobile framework for app development. The noteworthy point is that this share of respondents stayed the same for 2019 and 2020.
However, even more interesting is the difference in the percentage of developers who chose Flutter. It jumped by 9% to reach 39% in 2020 from 30% in 2019.
If you are new to the app development industry and don’t know about Flutter, you are at the right place. You’ll learn about Flutter, its advantages, and how to create a Magento 2 Flutter App in this post.
What is Flutter?
According to Flutter’s official site, “Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.”
In other words, it is a free and open-source mobile user interface framework that Google created and released in May 2017. It helps you create a native mobile application with just a single code.
It refers to two things:
- An SDK (Software Development Kit) is a collection of tools to help you develop applications. You can compile your code natively using these tools to develop apps in both iOS and Android systems.
- A Framework is a library collection of reusable UI elements, including buttons, text inputs, sliders, etc., that you can personalize as per your needs.
Flutter requires you to use Dart – Google’s programming language to develop an app using it.
Benefits of Using Flutter
Over 2 million developers have already used Flutter as of spring last year and still counting. There are several advantages of using Flutter to develop a Magento 2 Flutter App.
Uniform UI and Business Logic across All Platforms
In general, all cross-platform frameworks provide a way to share codebase between platforms. On the other hand, Flutter allows the exchange of both UI code and UI itself between platforms.
Unlike other cross-platform frameworks, Flutter doesn’t require any platform-specific UI components to render the UI. Instead, it needs to show the application UI only a canvas to draw onto. This helps maintain consistency across different platforms without much hassle.
Also, sharing the UI and business logic helps save time and effort for the developer.
Reduced Coding Time – Faster Development
Flutter has the “hot reload” feature. This feature helps you quickly review the changes you apply without losing the current app state. You can easily experiment and build UIs, add features, test them, and fix bugs.
Thus, it helps reduce the overall app development time and enhances the app development process’s speed.
Besides, Flutter provides an extensive range of ready-to-use customizable widgets, making app development faster and simpler.
Native App Performance
Instead of relying on any intermediate code representations or interpretation, you can build a Magento 2 Flutter app directly into the machine code. It helps eliminate the performance bugs of the interpretation process. It enables you to compile your application more efficiently and faster.
Further, Flutter also lets you use existing Java, Objective-C, Swift code to access native features on iOS and Android. This is the reason that the performance of a Flutter app closely resembles that of a native app.
Expressive and Beautiful UIs
To make an app’s look and interface expressive and engaging, widgets should be attractive. They should also be flexible, structural, interactive, and customizable. Flutter has a rich collection of widgets that you can use to create flexible and expressive designs.
Increased speed of time-to-market
Time to market (also called TTM or time-to-market) is the period between the conception of a new idea and its release in the marketplace. You can also call it the time a team takes to develop an idea, build a product, and sell it in the market.
Coming to Flutter development, it is easier and quicker in comparison to other cross-platform frameworks. In fact, the person-hours you need to develop a Magento 2 Flutter app is around half of the person-hours you need for a native app. The reason is that you don’t need to develop the same app separately for Android and iOS. This is because Flutter doesn’t require you to have any platform-specific code to add any desired visuals in your app. You can implement any 2D-based UI without any need to interact with a native app counterpart.
Ideal for MVP
Flutter is an ideal choice for start-ups who want to develop MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) to show to the investors. As a Flutter mobile app looks and behaves natively on Android and iOS, it gives the investors a clear idea about your MVP. It helps expedite the process of attracting investments from potential investors.
Support for Complex Animated UI
Flutter provides the ability to customize virtually everything on the screen irrespective of the complexity involved. Though it is possible to customize UI on native platforms, it is comparatively time-consuming. On the other hand, Flutter makes the process of UI customization highly flexible and versatile. This helps perform shared element transitions, shape/shadow/color customizations, and other processes without straining yourself.
We can help you deploy a Flutter app!
Large Support Community
Flutter Developer Community can help answer all your questions and stay abreast of every new and exciting development in Flutter. You can interact with other developers, take help, and learn more through Stack Overflow, Gitter, Meetup, Flutter Community Slack, r/Flutterdev on Reddit, and other platforms. This helps make your app development learning fun and easy.
Over to You
Flutter can be an ideal pick for newbies and startups to develop an app due to ease of coding and flexibility.
We can help you build a cross-platform Magento 2 Flutter app from scratch. Our app development team has vast hands-on experience who can understand your business requirements and develop your e-commerce app accordingly. You can also avail of continuous support for app development from our team.
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