Flutter is now the leading cross-platform app development framework used by most developers. The rise of Flutter has not been meteoric, given that ever since its release, it continued to grow in popularity and ultimately toppled its arch-rival React Native from the top position only in 2021 as the most loved mobile app development technology.
Though Flutter is praised and loved by everyone, particularly startups find Flutter as the ideal framework for shaping their app footprints. Startups prefer to hire a top Flutter app development agency to turn their app idea into a profitable application because Flutter allows them to build apps for all native mobile OS platforms besides the web and desktop. Several other reasons made Flutter the number one choice technology for startup app projects.
Here below are the key reasons for Flutter emerging as the right solution for mobile app startups.
Single Codebase for All Platforms
The most significant advantage of using Flutter in startup app projects is using a single codebase for multiple operating system platforms such as iOS and Android mobile OS, desktop platforms such as Linux, Windows, and macOS, and the web. Flutter developers can use one core codebase across all app versions and platforms.
Most of the time, startups are dragged by budget shortfalls and find Flutter solutions to develop an app for several lucrative platforms. They can reuse a single codebase for their web app, desktop app, and iOS and Android app. Apart from the budget perspective, this approach also helps startups maintain consistency across diverse platforms regarding user experience.
Widget-based Modular Development
Another reason startups choose Flutter for their mobile app projects is the framework’s modularity. Modularity refers to the ease of making value additions and changes by just replacing and tweaking things a little. This is exactly what the Flutter framework promises to do.
Flutter is the framework that ensures modular development by using a repository of rich UI widgets. Flutter comes with a rich library of widgets representing a variety of UI elements for every OS platform, including the fonts, buttons, grids, and several elements. These widgets can be chosen, mixed, and matched per the app project’s requirement. This modularity e sure s not just an ease of development but also helps developers to finish the project earlier and with relative ease.
The Dart Programming Language
The use of Dart programming language by Flutter is another major reason for startups to choose Flutter. From the outset, it seems that Dart, a relatively newer language, may prove to be more challenging in terms of the learning curve, but Dart once learned well, can help achieve better development results. Dart is well known for its low-footprint coding and transparent conventions.
According to the experience of most seasoned Flutter developers, Dart ensures optimum development output because of low boilerplate code, clean and concise coding, and lower coding errors. Despite being a new language in the mobile app development scene, Dart has become prominent because of Flutter and will continue to make things easier for cross-platform developers.
Hot Reload Feature
Flutter makes development and testing more accessible and less time-consuming because of another important feature called Hot Reload. Generally, while writing the code, app developers need to test their code and evaluate the impact of the code time and again by refreshing and reloading the app. This requires much time and resources, resulting in greater development time and higher costs through development hours.
This is another area where the Hot Reload feature of Flutter comes as a handy feature. Thanks to this feature, the app developers can just write their code or make code changes and see the results in real-time through a running app without waiting for reloading and refreshing. This ultimately saves development time as developers do not need to reload the app multiple times during development. On the other hand, the same feature also helps the quality assurance (QA) specialists evaluate the real-time changes, saving a lot of testing time.
No JavaScript Bridge
Normally, cross-platform development frameworks like React Native and Xamarin reuse 80% or more of the core codebase across platforms barring the code required for the native UI layer. To achieve native user experience and app performance, these cross-platform frameworks connect the native UI layers using a separate JavaScript bridge. The development of This delay besides often results in incoherence and inconsistency of the UI elements.
This is another key area where Flutter seems to have a bigger advantage for the app projects irrespective of the platform. The big advantage of using Flutter is that for accessing the native UI layer. You do not need any JavaScript bridge since the framework allows you to create native UI within the OS environment by using the platform-specific UI widgets.
Inbuilt Testing Support
When it comes to testing support, most cross-platform development frameworks mostly rely on third-party tools and APIs. Since testing is a key requirement for any app project, inbuilt testing support can effectively ensure an optimum user experience. This is another area where Flutter brings a different set of promises.
Flutter comes with inbuilt testing support for any cross-platform and native app project. With Flutter, testing an app and making the required changes becomes a streamlined process. On the one hand, the inbuilt testing tools reveal the short and flaws, and on the other hand. The Hot Reload feature allows developers to make the changes in real-time.
Out-of-the-box Backend Support
Most of the cross-platform development frameworks in the market. Such as React Native and Xamarin, are frontend frameworks looking after the representation layer of the app. They are not fully equipped to work as a full development stack. This is another key area where Flutter has an edge.
Flutter also works as a full development stack because of its out-of-the-box backend support. Google Firebase, accessible within Flutter. And can take care of the backend development tasks in web and mobile app development tasks. While Flutter takes care of the frontend development. No wonder, Flutter is often regarded as one of the full-stack development stacks.
Support for a Wide Range of IDEs
Any app project must have integrated development environments (IDE) to run all the libraries, components, UI/UX elements, etc. While other cross-platform development frameworks do not support all major IDEs for app projects. Flutter supports almost every IDE to develop, test and run apps across platforms.
Flutter supports multiple IDEs for development, including IntelliJ, Android Studio, Visual Studio, and many others. Because of this more comprehensive support and flexibility, Flutter is so often preferred by developers in cross-platform app projects.
Wrapping Up
As of now, you must have understood why Flutter became so crucial a framework or technology for cross-platform app projects. Flutter ultimately ensures ultimate flexibility and scalability while keeping the requirement of resources and investment to a minimum level. So startup app projects often beleaguered by budget and competition find Flutter such a lucrative technology option.
