Flutter vs. Industry-leading Frameworks - The Ultimate Comparison Guide Flutter vs. Industry-leading Frameworks JOSH SOFTWARE SECTION TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction What Is Google Flutter? Why Did Google Create Flutter In The First Place? How Does Google Flutter Work? Seven Ways In Which Flutter Is Setting Trends In The Mobile App Development Industry All The Chatter Around Flutter Google Flutter In Comparison To Your Favorite Application Development Frameworks Flutter VS React Native Flutter VS Android studio Flutter VS Ionic Flutter VS Xamarin Flutter VS Angular Getting Started With Mobile App development? We Got Your Back! 2 Flutter vs. Industry-leading Frameworks JOSH SOFTWARE Introduction Cross-platform app development productivity amongst the team like Facebook and Microsoft use frameworks have gained a lot of members, contributing to the React Native, Google Flutter has momentum in the past few years. overall profitability. also gained popularity amongst The reason behind it being the tech companies like Groupon, eBay, ease it brings to the process of While there are several cross- and Tencent. app development. Unlike earlier, platform app development when developers had to write frameworks, two of the most Though a newbie in the market, codes adaptive to each platform prominent ones are React Flutter’s ever-growing popularity, separately, run them for testing, Native; Facebook’s open-source evolution in terms of its features and accommodate changes after app development framework, indicates a future market leader in reviews, all these functions can be and its comparatively newer the making. done with a single set of codes. It contemporary, Google Flutter. On has led to cost reduction, elevated the one hand, where tech giants 3 Flutter vs. Industry-leading Frameworks JOSH SOFTWARE What is Google Flutter? Google Flutter is the tech giant’s open-source, cross-platform app development program. It was launched in 2017 at the Flutter Live event. Flutter combined the ease of development with better performance without compromising on the visual consistency between platforms. Additionally, Flutter is free of cost, thus making it popular amongst the developers. Currently, there are approximately 20,000 apps on the Google play store that were developed using Flutter. Some important names are Alibaba group, Groupon, 4 eBay, and other popular e-commerce platforms. Flutter vs. Industry-leading Frameworks JOSH SOFTWARE Why Did Google Create Flutter In The First Place? Back in 2015, when there was no Flutter, there existed a tug of war between web browsers. Developers at Google were investing all of their energy and resources towards optimizing their browser, Google chrome. Soon after, Google launched Fuchsia in 2016. Fuchsia is Google’s cross-device operating system. Though Fuchsia did attract some attention from the industry, it didn’t gain a lot of traction. All of this changed when Flutter came into being. With Google Flutter, every app that is created gets uploaded to the Fuchsia store automatically. Though one cannot attribute Flutter’s existence only to serve the purpose of strengthening Fuchsia’s ecosystem even before it goes live, one cannot deny it is a part of Google’s future strategies. According to Tim Sneath, Group product manager at Google, ‘Flutter has been Google’s long-term dream. With Flutter, their vision is to provide the world with a powerful, general-purpose, open UI toolkit for building incredible experiences on any device- embedded, mobile, desktop or beyond’. During the initial launch of Flutter, it might have seemed overly ambitious to a few, like React Native, a much older and favorable cross-platform app development by Facebook. Flutter was able to establish a firm foot in the industry within no time. To do this, Flutter had to provide more than just a framework. And that is precisely what Google did. Flutter provided an array of extra support, a large community, ease of installation, and many more perks to the developers. And the results were phenomenal. Within no time, Flutter surpassed the popularity of most of its contemporaries. How Does Google Flutter Work? Flutter, as we already know, is a Android and iOS. reusable UI that enables you to free and open-source mobile UI customize the app according to framework. It allows you to create Now Flutter consists of two parts; your requirements. Flutter uses native mobile applications with a An SDK and a Framework. SDK or the programming language Dart, single codebase. In other words, Software development kit is a a language created by Google one can use a single programming collection of tools that helps you back in 2011. Dart’s syntax is quite language and codebase to develop your applications. And similar to that of JavaScript. 5 develop apps compatible with the framework is a collection of Flutter vs. Industry-leading Frameworks JOSH SOFTWARE SECTION Seven Ways In Which Flutter Is Setting Trends In The Mobile App Development Industry Fast development: Global community support: Flutter has Hot Reload and a single codebase, Flutter boasts a large community of developers from which helps develop a cross-platform app that around the globe. They constantly support creating provides a native base performance to your new features and fixing bugs in the framework, app in less time. Flutter’s Hot Reload feature thus catalyzing the process of building a highly gives it an advantage over other frameworks. sophisticated framework. With a single click, developers can apply the new changes. The Hot Reload feature compares Cost and time deductive: previous code and the changes and applies only the latest changes. A significant factor in contributing to the fast-growing Beautiful UI: popularity of Flutter is that it saves time and cost induced while developing an app, thus accelerating the project’s profitability. one can build an expressive UI with Flutter’s built-in beautiful material design and Cupertino (iOS-flavor) widgets. Additionally, one also gets With Flutter product rich motion APIs, smooth, natural scrolling, becomes the prototype: and platform awareness. Its built in-app feature helps in fast development with a fully One of the most time-consuming factors while customizable widget that can be reused if one developing a product is the to and fro between requires any further customization in the future. designers, clients, and the rest of the teams. With The layered architecture allows developers to reviews being conducted during every stage of control every pixel, thus empowering them to product development, the design team has to put make changes quickly and get into the intricate in extra labor to make a prototype and then include details of the design. Flutter doesn’t rely on changes in the same. This task becomes quite tedious native UI components to render. It uses the and, at times, leads to a lack of clarity. With Flutter, inbuilt Skia rendering engine, thus saving much the pain of building a prototype is taken care of as time. the product becomes the prototype. Any changes requested by the client can be made within no time and at any phase of development. 6 Flutter vs. Industry-leading Frameworks JOSH SOFTWARE Easy customization: Team management: With Flutter, it’s all about the widgets. With an As Flutter enables developers to create apps extensive widget library, any customization for both android and iOS systems at the same becomes much more manageable. Along time, it reduces the workforce required to with that, it’s fast to update and manage monitor product development for both. One applications. Your developer has to develop a team can overlook the entire development single codebase, and it will work for both iOS process. and Android. 7 Flutter vs. Industry-leading Frameworks JOSH SOFTWARE All The Chatter Around Flutter Since its inception, Flutter has created quite a buzz in the app development business worldwide. This newbie is famous for more than its association with Big daddy Google. This section will try to highlight why Flutter has become an instant favorite amongst developers and product managers. Flutter is a hit amongst small and medium-sized Suppose an organization focuses on developing clients. The reason being one project developed Android apps (for example, in South Asian markets, using Flutter will give output in Flutter as well almost 90% of apps sold are Android apps). In Native apps. This helps developers overcome the that case, Flutter is like a magic key to success limitations of deploying two different sets of teams for them. Flutter allows much more inputs for the for Android and iOS ends. This helps alleviate Android app development market. Along with that, the team’s overall productivity, cuts costs as a it also provides quite a few features for the iOS small team is required to carry out the tasks, and app market. It is a win-win deal for startups and catalyzes the overall app development progress. mid-sized organizations. Teams can now focus on the mass production of apps, be it ToB or ToC apps for any field, thanks to the one-end development multi-end production feature of Flutter. 8 Flutter vs. Industry-leading Frameworks JOSH SOFTWARE Google Flutter In Comparison To Your Favorite Application Development Frameworks Flutter VS React Native FASTER DEVELOPMENT = MORE PROFIT: The first and most significant difference between Flutter and React Native is that with Flutter, you don’t have to write a separate set of codes for different formats, but with React Native, one has to go over the codes and write them from scratch for every format. In other words, the time-to-market for an app developed using Flutter is way faster than the one made using React Native. It also helps reduce engineering costs for apps created by using Flutter, thus making them more profitable from a business perspective.