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What is cross-platform development in the context of Flutter?
What are the advantages of using Flutter for cross-platform development?
Can Flutter access platform-specific features and APIs?
Is Flutter a good choice for beginners in app development?
How can you ensure a faster and successful release of your business app to the market where the customer uses a range of devices such as mobile, desktops, and iPads to interact with the online business services?
Though the problem looks quite difficult, Flutter has come up with a unique way to solve it using Flutter multiplatform.
In this article, we will learn about Flutter cross-platform development, Flutter features, and how it helps developers deliver multi-experience by supporting cross-platform development.
Today web and mobile apps are used for various purposes such as communication, social networking, transportation, online shopping, food delivery, medical services, banking, and so on. However, among such millions of online applications, only a few became successful.
So what is a secret ingredient for making your app successful?
As the number of apps is constantly growing in the market, the expectations for a better user experience is also rising. Users now prefer high-quality applications that not only satisfy their needs but also deliver a smoother experience across different platforms (Android, iOS) and the web.
That is the reason why businesses are more focused on cross-platform development.
Flutter multiplatform has capabilities to speed up your cross-platform development without hampering the code quality, scalability, and reliability aspects of your application.
Before building an application for single or multiple platforms, a project manager must make the standard decision of whether to develop an entirely native application or to use a cross-platform approach to app development.
However, building native or cross-platform applications has its pros and cons. A native application is highly efficient and gives native look to the app but it is still highly expensive and time-consuming if built for different platforms.
On the contrary, implementing a cross-platform approach for multi-platform development is less time-consuming and also has lower development costs but the native controls are tough to integrate.
Therefore developers need something that can solve the issues in cross-platform app development and here Flutter comes into the picture. Flutter provides you with everything that you need for building successful cross platform app development .
Flutter For Cross-Platform
Flutter is an open-source UI software development framework developed by Google used to build cross-platform applications for different platforms from a single codebase without compromising on code quality, speed, and performance.
It renders your application rather than relying on the platform to do so, making your app extremely fast and responsive. Also, it has its own engine written in C and C++ that runs Dart code.
Dart is a programming language developed by Google. It is designed for building web, mobile, and desktop applications. Dart was first unveiled by Google in 2011, and it has since gained popularity as the primary language for developing applications using the Flutter framework, which is an open-source UI toolkit for building natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.
Dart supports cross-platform development primarily through its association with the Flutter framework
Here's how Dart, in conjunction with Flutter, facilitates cross-platform development:
Single Codebase: Dart is the primary language used in Flutter development. With Flutter, you write code once and use it across different platforms, such as iOS, Android, web, and desktop. This single codebase significantly reduces development time and effort compared to building separate applications for each platform.
Native-Like Performance: Flutter compiles Dart code into native machine code, resulting in high performance and smooth user experiences on various platforms. This is crucial for mobile applications, where performance is a key consideration.
Consistent User Interfaces: Flutter provides a rich set of widgets that allow you to create consistent and beautiful user interfaces across platforms. The "widget" architecture in Flutter encourages a declarative UI design approach, where you describe how the UI should look based on its current state.
Responsive Design: Dart and Flutter enable developers to create responsive designs that adapt to different screen sizes and orientations, making it easier to target both mobile and desktop devices with the same codebase.
According to Google, “over 2 million developers” are already using Flutter and half a million users now use the open-source UI framework Flutter every month.
In addition, there are more than 1 million apps on the Google Play Store that are created with Flutter.
According to the 2023 Stack Overflow developer survey, Flutter is among the top 10 most popular frameworks.
Flutter Popularity Stack Overflow
Unlike other frameworks, Flutter has no bridge or context switch between the platform and your application as shown below.
Flutter has no bridge or context switch
Flutter app development only requires Canvas and Events to render the widgets to appear on the device screen and access services such as geolocation, sensor, camera, audio, Bluetooth, etc. Furthermore, the application is compiled in AOT (Ahead of Time) instead of JIT ( Just in Time) like JavaScript.
Let’s understand how it contrasts with other ways of app development for multiple platforms.
You can build separate applications for different platforms, in such cases, your code will call the built-in platform UI elements directly but the drawback is each code base will be written in a different native language.
As a result, the development team must maintain consistency between each codebase to maintain the same feature set as the app grows.
Another approach we can use is the single codebase for cross-platform development using Web Views and Bridge. Using a bridge to communicate with the platform lowers your app performance.
From the above discussion, we can conclude that Flutter is too advanced in terms of features provided for cross-platform development.
With the Flutter cross-paltform, business owners can implement a multi-experience development strategy for various platforms with a single codebase without worrying about cost and quality issues.
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