Flutter — An Open Source Google SDK

It was a day in 2017 when Flutter framework was first officially launched by Google, for building cross-platform mobile applications. It was a competition to the React native framework which was launched by Facebook back in 2015. But due to it’s easiness and performance and more enhanced UI than React native it became much popular in the early 2021.

It is based on dart programming language which was also created by Google to support the Flutter framework. It works on widget rendering which is quite fast as it uses Skia Engine to render the widgets. This rendering technique can controller every pixel on the screen when doing development.

Right now flutter is the most fastest growing cross-platform framework there is to build mobile applications. On the newer versions of flutter which are up than 3.x.x support more than just the Mobile application development.

Flutter versions 3.x.x onwards support following platfroms:

• Android
• iOS
• Web
• Window
• macOS
• Linux

Flutter provides a predefined set of Material and Cupertino widgets that gives the application a beautiful look. Even though these widgets are prebuilt flutter still gives full customization for every widget.

Features of Flutter -

1. Single Codebase — Flutter uses a single codebase for all the platforms through dart language, which makes it pretty easy to handle all the platform UI at once by writing a single file for the screens.
2. Hot Reload — Flutter provides a feature called hot reload, as from the name it it makes it easy for developing user interface quickly by only changing the UI without reloading the complete applications. It is a game changer feature provided by Flutter.
3. State management — Unlike Android, iOS and web-applications where users need two different languages, one for working on UI and other for logics, Flutter integrates it all at once it provides widgets for UI through framework and it can handle all the logic inside the dart only without requiring any other framework or languages.
4. Performance — Flutter provides super performance around 60fps to 120fps based on the device allowed, as it has it’s own rendering engine which makes the user interaction very fast and smooth, providing native application experience.
5. Customizable UI — Flutter provides many inbuilt Widgets like Container, Radio Buttons, Material Buttons and many more, still it gives the user full access to build new widget in any shape and size which makes the UI more beautiful and unique.
6. Animations — Flutter provides many implicit and explicit animations which makes the user experience very smooth and interactive, also it provides many Widgets by combining them developers can create new smoother animations.
7. FFI — FFI stands for Foreign Function Integration, which enables the flutter to write code in different languages like C, C++, Java etc and call it directly through the Flutter code which makes the Flutter framework more powerful to expand by using the existing code directly into the framework.

Disadvantage of Flutter -

1. Larger App Size — As compared to Native Android/iOS applications, Flutter applications are still bigger in size, a single screen application in Android/iOS would be only a few 20–40KB, but in Flutter it can go up to 1–2MB size. This happens because the Flutter uses Skia Engine in background to render the application UI.
2. Less Native support — Right now flutter uses method channels and event channels, to communicate with the native Android/iOS code which makes the communication more complex and frustrating sometime for new developers.
3. Weak Web/Desktop Support — While the Mobile application development has a lot of features, Web and Desktop application still are under development and have many less features which make it hard to develop for these platforms.

Scopes of Flutter -

Flutter is focusing on enhancing AI and machine learning into applications using tools like TensorFlow Lite, enabling smarter and more intelligent apps.

Flutter is improving the native channels to make the platform specific API more easy to implement with the rest of the code.