When it comes to cross-platform app development, Flutter has brought about the powerful waves into the transformative tech sea. Over the years since its inception in 2017, this framework has been through various updates and upgrades. The future of Flutter app development certainly has many considerable opportunities for developers and stakeholders.
As a developer or project/business head you must be eager to know what are the future updates for this amazing technology. Who doesn’t want to make the best out of their resources after all. Well, in this blog we will discuss Flutter’s growing presence across the industry and the Future of Flutter development.
Flutter’s Growing Presence and Preference
Flutter is a popular open-source UI (User Interface) framework developed by Google that allows developers to create native-like applications for multiple platforms using a single codebase. Since its launch in 2017, Flutter has gained significant traction in the industry and has become one of the leading choices for mobile app development.
Its demand is based on several key factors. However, the most important reason for Flutter’s growing presence and popularity is the cross-platform benefit. This excellent framework was introduced with the goal of creating a unified codebase that can address multiple platforms with zero modifications. With every passing year and new update, developers and designers are now getting even closer to it.
There are more than 700,000 apps in the PlayStore that use Flutter (As per data from January 2023). Firms across various industries have now understood the concept of strong design and exceptional functionality.
Industry giants like BMW and Toyota look forward to enhancing their infotainment systems and management apps for luxury cars with Flutter development. Similarly, Philips and eBay are coming up with ways to enhance the services they provide. Certainly, Flutter’s future has to be brighter with updates that really make a difference.
Also Read: What Makes Flutter the Best Enterprise App Development Platform?
Benefits Of Flutter App Development
Every now and then, we have been discussing the benefits of Flutter app development within our blogs. Before starting off with the future updates for this framework, let’s once again understand the unique benefits it offers.
Code Reusability
Flutter's unique architecture allows developers to write code once and use it to create applications for iOS, Android, web, and desktop platforms. This is made possible through Flutter's widget-based approach, where UI components are assembled using a hierarchy of reusable widgets. These widgets encapsulate both the visual and functional aspects of an application, making them highly reusable across different platforms.
Developers can significantly reduce development time and effort. They can focus on writing and maintaining a single codebase, rather than maintaining separate codebases for each platform. Any updates or enhancements made to the codebase reflect across all platforms, ensuring consistency and reducing the chances of introducing bugs or inconsistencies.
Code reusability also facilitates faster time-to-market, as developers can simultaneously release their applications on multiple platforms without the need for extensive platform-specific development. Additionally, it promotes code consistency and maintainability, as changes and improvements only need to be made in one place. Thus it is easier to manage and update the application over time.
Customizable Widgets
Flutter is an open-source UI framework that enables developers to build beautiful and highly customizable user interfaces. It comes with the ability to create and modify widgets according to specific requirements and design preferences. With Flutter, developers can create their own custom widgets by composing existing widgets or building them from scratch.
Flutter provides a rich set of built-in widgets that can be customized with various properties, such as color, size, shape, and more. Additionally, developers can create their own custom widgets by combining these existing widgets or by implementing new ones using Flutter's flexible widget architecture.
The customizability of widgets in Flutter allows developers to create unique and visually appealing interfaces that match the design requirements of their applications. This flexibility empowers developers to deliver highly tailored user experiences while maintaining code reusability and efficiency.
Advanced UI
Flutter is a powerful framework for building advanced user interfaces (UI) that deliver exceptional experiences across multiple platforms. As a Flutter app development company, there’s a lot that we love about it. With Flutter, developers can create beautiful and highly customizable UI designs, enabling them to craft stunning user experiences.
One of Flutter's standout features include its rich set of built-in widgets and tools for creating complex UI layouts. It offers a wide range of pre-designed widgets, such as buttons, text fields, lists, and animations, that can be customized to fit specific design requirements. Additionally, Flutter allows developers to create their own custom widgets, empowering them to design unique and innovative UI elements.
Flutter's advanced UI capabilities extend beyond basic widget composition. It supports advanced animations, transitions, and gestures, enabling developers to create fluid and interactive UI experiences. Its powerful rendering engine ensures smooth and responsive UI performance, even on lower-end devices.
Ease Of Use
Flutter is considered easier to learn and use for several reasons. Firstly, it offers a single codebase for developing applications for multiple platforms, including iOS and Android, which reduces the need for platform-specific knowledge and development efforts.
Its declarative UI approach simplifies the development process by allowing developers to describe the desired user interface and leaving the framework to handle the rendering. This eliminates the need for intricate manual UI manipulation.
Additionally, Flutter provides a rich set of pre-built widgets and extensive documentation, enabling developers to quickly create interactive and visually appealing apps without reinventing the wheel.
Hot-Reloading
Hot reloading is a feature that allows developers to make changes to their code and see the updates instantly, without the need to restart the application. When a change is made in the code, the Flutter framework applies the modifications while preserving the current app state. This significantly speeds up the development process, as it eliminates the need to manually rebuild and redeploy the entire application.
Hot reloading is particularly useful for experimenting with UI changes, fine-tuning app behavior, and quickly iterating on code. It enhances developer productivity by providing a fast feedback loop and reducing development time.
Mature Ecosystem
Flutter has built a mature ecosystem with a vibrant community over time. It offers a rich set of pre-designed widgets, making it easy to create beautiful and responsive user interfaces for mobile, web, and desktop applications.
It also boasts a robust development toolkit with tools like Flutter DevTools for debugging and profiling, as well as integration with popular IDEs. Additionally, Flutter benefits from active community support, extensive documentation, and a thriving marketplace for plugins and extensions, ensuring developers have ample resources to build high-quality applications.
Drawbacks Of Flutter App Development
Like the two faces of a coin, there are a few drawbacks of Flutter as well. However, we assure you they do not overshadow all the good things it has to offer.
Limited Resources
One drawback of Flutter app development services is its limited availability of resources and libraries compared to more established frameworks like React Native. As Flutter is a relatively new framework, the number of community-supported packages and libraries is smaller, making it more challenging to find specific solutions or integrations.
While Flutter's ecosystem is growing rapidly, developers may encounter difficulties when looking for specific functionalities or trying to integrate with less popular platforms or services. However, the active Flutter developers’ community and the continuous development efforts by Google are addressing this limitation, and the availability of resources is expected to improve over time.
Massive File Size
Flutter comes with the potential for large file sizes in the compiled application which contributes to its downside. Flutter apps are bundled with the Dart runtime, which increases the overall size of the app. Additionally, its framework and widgets contribute to the file size. This can be a concern for mobile applications, especially those targeting devices with limited storage or slower internet connections.
However, there are optimization techniques and tools available to help reduce the file size, such as code splitting, tree shaking, and compression techniques. Developers need to carefully consider these factors when building Flutter apps to ensure optimal performance and user experience.
Also Read: How to Hire Flutter App Developers For Your Project
The Future Of Flutter App Development - What’s Next?
As a relatively new mobile app development platform offering cross-platform compatibility, Flutter has come a long way till today. There’s no doubt that this technology holds fruitful, progressive updates for the future.
While the first release of Flutter offered a UI toolkit for building iOS and Android mobile apps, Flutter 3.7.0 is all about adding a broader set of new features. These features expand support for Windows, macOS, Linux, and the web as well along with enabling the embedded platforms to use Flutter.
We have listed down a few expected upgrades and their effects with Flutter 3.7.0 and upcoming versions.
Exceptional Graphics Performance
If we consider the past, cross-platform frameworks often compromise with the visuals because of difficulties in creating the abstraction layers. However, Flutter took a different approach than most cross-platform frameworks.
It comes with its own rendering layer that provides hardware-accelerated graphics resulting in consistent visual appearance on all devices. Flutter 3.7.0 and its upcoming versions are likely to focus on offering exceptional graphics performance.
This will be done through Impeller, Flutter’s next generation rendering engine. Impeller provides more predictable performance, flexibility, and control over the graphics pipeline. Additionally, it offers a lot more than just silky smooth UI by improving performance in various other areas.
Seamless Integration For Mobile & Web
While developers can use Flutter and Dart to write an entire app, in any you will have to connect it with other code. Flutter may be used as an embedded component within a large app on the web. And mobile apps may need to call system APIs or codes that are written in other programming languages.
Therefore, the next focus of Flutter app development is likely to be seamless integration for mobile and web. This new feature called element embedding will allow Flutter content to be added to any standard web. Interesting. Right?
We may also expect a few changes in the JS package which will ensure seamless interoperability between JavaScript and Dart. Additionally, some new approaches to interoperability are on their way.
Newly Emerging Architectures
Dart programming language offers broader support for a wide range of processor architecture and a highly-optimized JavaScript compiler. Thus, Flutter can run smoothly on various devices and form factors. In the future, Flutter is likely to collaborate with Chrome and other WebAssembly partners to provide early support for languages like Dart.
This early support for Flutter compilation to WebAssembly will further optimize the size and speed for web support. Additionally, Dart now supports RISC-V. This means Flutter can run on RISC-V devices as and when they become available.
Focus On Developer Experience
Ever since Flutter’s inception, developer experience has been its hallmark. All the other points mentioned above are meant to improve developer experience. Flutter team’s continued focus on developer experience is another important theme for the future. Early support for records and patterns and various other Dart language features indicate the same.
Conclusion
The future of Flutter app development looks brighter with all the efforts their teams are enthusiastically putting-in. Some foundational improvements and betterment of core development experience is on the way. Certainly, building apps using Flutter’s cross-platform capabilities is going to bring good fortune for respective projects.
However, make sure you choose and hire Flutter app developers very carefully as per your project requirements. Understanding market trends and utilizing the best skills will result in successful applications. If you are seeking similar services or have queries, feel free to fill the contact form below. We’ll reach out to you sooner than you expect.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What are the advantages of using Flutter for app development?
A: Flutter offers several advantages, including fast development, hot reload feature for quick code changes, a single codebase for both iOS and Android platforms, a rich set of pre-built UI components, excellent performance, and native-like user experiences.
Q: What programming language is used in Flutter app development?
A: Flutter uses Dart as its primary programming language. Dart is a modern, object-oriented language that is easy to learn and offers features like strong static typing and just-in-time (JIT) compilation.
Q: Can Flutter be used for building both iOS and Android apps?
A: Yes, Flutter allows developers to build high-quality native apps for both iOS and Android platforms using a single codebase. This means developers can write code once and deploy it on multiple platforms.
Q: Is Flutter suitable for cross-platform app development?
A: Yes, Flutter is well-suited for cross-platform app development. Its ability to create a single codebase for multiple platforms enables developers to save time and effort while delivering consistent user experiences across different devices.
Q: Are there any notable apps built with Flutter?
A: Yes, several popular apps are built using Flutter. For example Google Ads, Alibaba, Reflectly, and Hamilton (the official app for the Broadway musical).
Q: Is Flutter a good choice for beginners in app development?
A: Flutter can be a good choice for beginners due to its simplicity and the availability of extensive documentation and resources. The hot reload feature also allows for faster development iterations and easier debugging.
Q: Can you integrate existing native Android or iOS code with Flutter?
A: Yes, Flutter allows for the integration of existing native code. Developers can leverage platform channels to communicate between Flutter and platform-specific code, enabling the use of existing functionality or libraries.
Q: Does Flutter support accessing device features like camera, GPS, and sensors?
A: Yes, Flutter provides plugins that allow developers to access device features such as the camera, GPS, sensors, and more. The Flutter community maintains a wide range of plugins, making it easier to integrate native functionality into Flutter apps.
Q: How can I monetize Flutter apps?
A: There are various methods to monetize Flutter apps such as displaying ads, offering in-app purchases, implementing subscription models, or providing premium features. Additionally, Flutter apps can also be used to promote and drive traffic to other products or services.
Q: Is Flutter suitable for building complex and high-performance apps?
A: Yes, Flutter is capable of building complex and high-performance apps. Its underlying rendering engine, Skia, allows for smooth animations and graphics. Flutter's performance is comparable to native apps, making it suitable for demanding applications.
Q: What tools and IDEs are available for Flutter app development?
A: Flutter is compatible with multiple Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, and IntelliJ IDEA. These IDEs provide Flutter-specific extensions, plugins, and debugging tools to enhance the development experience.
Q: Does Flutter have good community support?
A: Yes, Flutter has a vibrant and active community. Developers can find resources, tutorials, and solutions to common problems on platforms like Stack Overflow, GitHub, and the official Flutter website. The community also contributes to the development of plugins and packages.
Q: Can Flutter apps be published on app stores?
A: Yes, Flutter apps can be published on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Flutter provides tools and documentation to package and distribute apps for both platforms, ensuring compliance with the respective app store guidelines.