Why choose Google Flutter for Mobile App development in 2019? with Pros and Cons

Today, the mobile technology that a business chooses is crucial to determining the digital experiences of its clients. Unlike in the past when mobile apps technologies focused on specific operating systems such as Android or iOS, the focus is now shifting to cross-platform development. One of the new players in the apps development niche is Flutter.

What is Flutter?

This is a Google-owned mobile app SDK (software development kit) developed as a complete package with widgets, tools, and frameworks to simplify the process of building and deploying mobile apps on both iOS and Android platforms. As a cross-platform development platform, it means that you do not need to separate the coding for your Android or iOS platforms. You simply use one codebase for both platforms. Besides, it also has the following traits:

• It is free and open-source. 
• It is based on Dart. 
• Its architecture is based on reactive programming.

Pros: Five Reasons Why You Should Choose Flutter

To a new user, it might appear like any other product in the long list of Google technologies. But it is a powerful SDK for developing top of the range of mobile applications. Here are the main pros of using technology.

(1) It Has Successfully Overcome Cross-platform Limitations

Designing a truly cross-platform development framework has been a major challenge for tech companies. But Flutter has overcome the limitations by making coding for both Android and iOS easy on the same framework. Simply write once but use it on different platforms.

(2) Helps to Increase Developers Productivity with a Huge Margin

In addition to simplifying Mobile app development, it helps to increase developer’s productivity through its “hot reload” feature. This feature allows you to see the changes as you make them and promptly implement changes when needed.

(3)  Less Testing

Because technology allows you to craft one app and deploy on two platforms, it implies that you will require less testing. By making it possible to use one codebase for Mobile app development, developers only write automatic tests once. Besides, quality assurance experts have less work since they only check one app.

(4) You can Apply the Same UI on Older Versions of targeted OS

When you use Flutter to develop applications, they will look the same in the latest and older versions of iOS and Android systems. Note that you will achieve this at no extra cost.

(5) Supports Multiple IDEs

If you are coding mobile apps, the technology provides access to many integrated development environments (IDE) such as Android Studio and Visual Code.

Cons Associated with Using Flutter

 While the app development technology comes with a plethora of benefits as outlined above, it also has a couple of demerits.

• Though libraries and support are impressive, they are not as rich as those of native development. This fact can be attributed to the fact that the technology is still relatively new and it will take time to build them. 
• The error logs you receive when your system has a layout error can be confusing. In some cases, the error points to some code lines that may be levels of abstraction well below what the developer interacts with. 

Conclusion

Flutter has demonstrated to be the new force that the mobile app development community has been waiting for. It is easy to use, robust, and more importantly, makes it possible to develop cross-platform apps. Although its support and libraries are lagging, their rate of growth and appeal to the programming community are impressive. This is a jewel that will no doubt set the pace for the next generation programming technologies.