Why Flutter is the most popular cross-platform mobile SDK

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#1

Why Flutter is the most popular cross-platform mobile SDK.
Running a development team for each mobile platform sucks up resources from other work. Flutter is the most popular way for one development team to build on all platforms.

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#2

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#3

I thought Ionic was still the most popular one. Probably a good time to start learning Flutter then and building some apps.

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#4

Now if only it were easy to bind to… and didn’t use Dart… >.>

I’ve never actually heard of that one? What be?

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#5

Flutter is Platform-friendly

Focusing on a single native application misses a significant portion of the market and limits the app’s potential future success. Separate native programs, on the other hand, might be time-consuming and expensive to develop.

Flutter makes developing for multiple platforms a breeze. Rather than writing code for each platform separately, developers can use Flutter’s one codebase.

However, Flutter’s cross-platform adaptability extends beyond code portability. Flutter-built user interfaces (UI) are also platform-agnostic, unlike other cross-platform frameworks like React Native and Xamarin, because Flutter’s Skia rendering engine does not require any platform-specific UI components.

Saves Time

Flutter includes a number of capabilities that enable developing cross-platform mobile apps easier and faster. The ability to use a single codebase and UI engine for cross-platform development, for example, decreases the time and work required to create versions of an app for Android and iOS.

These two are the major factors that developers and entrepreneurs are choosing flutter over other languages. Many on-demand business models are developed with flutter.

This is Charles from SpotnRides.

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#6

Oh, the language Google tried to replace JS with.
It was forgotten until they “spam” everybody with Flutter, IIRC Dart was in the top worst language to learn.

Hmmm…

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#7

Indeedy.

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#8

Dart is not so bad, sure it’s not a super fancy language but it’s kind nice.
It looks like a “light” Java/C#, less verbose though.
Between JS and Dart, I would pick up Dart …

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#9

Switched from Flutter to React Native. iOS App size reduced by 60% (that also without any optimization)

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#10

The data you mentioned in your research shows that Flutter had drastically risen in popularity since 2018. For me, flutter popularity leaves no doubt. And I think that Flutter is more of a “long-time” player on the market. It’s not even a pick of popularity now. I suppose the market lacks experienced developers (flutter launched in 2017/18). However, I strongly feel that the situation will change in the future. Also, analyzing what you’ve written, I pinpoint the biggest Flutter advantages: high performance, fast development, and strong community.

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#11

Same here. I want to start learning Flutter, but I am not sure if I want to learn Dart. :smiley:

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#12

I often hear that many people write their applications on fluter, because it allows you to write a cross-platform application as quickly as possible. But I personally tried to study the fluter for several days, and somehow I didn’t like it. It is not so easy to solve problems on it, as it seemed to me according to rumors on the Internet.

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#13

I might be wrong, but I feel react native is more popular…
There are still a lot of issues in Flutter, like the maturity of the libraries and resources.

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#14

My company was using Ionic for a number of years and a few years ago we gave up and went straight native. We didn’t consider any other cross-platform dev tool because it was not clear that the problems we had with ionic would be resolved with flutter or react native or xamarin. The HUGE issues that we had:

  1. Builds constantly broke due to the underlying platforms changing with new iOS/Android updates
  2. Libraries that we used were constantly abandoned by the devs that were writing them and there was no interest in writing native code to build our own plugins (might as well be a native app at that point)
  3. Trying to get the apps to looks like their native experiences took a LOT of work. It got to a point that the codebase was full of if ANDROID do this ELSE do this.
  4. Documentation was horrible so finding solutions took significant longer than native. After we finished migrating to pure native it took less time to build both apps on their respective platforms than it took to build the hybrid solution. Due to all of the movement of the underlying software and the movement of ionic itself, once we finished the app we had to immediately re-write the apps so that we could continue to push to the app/play stores.

Despite all of this, I would recommend hybrid frameworks for personal indie apps. But for apps for your business where you collect and make money and you have time sensitive deliverables with your customer base… well, you get what you deserve if you use a hybrid framework :stuck_out_tongue:

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#15

There truly will not be a “cross platform native looking GUI” because iOS and Android ‘act’ too different, something that feels native on one definitely won’t on the other, so you will always have such conditionals just by the very design structure of how they work.

Lately I’ve been using Tauri, it’s basically electron but with substantially less javascript (I’ve been using Rust) and far updated and more capable (native library integration is a breeze in comparison). No it still doesn’t look “native” but eh, I can substantially minimize the JS needed and stick to a good language.

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#16

After JetBrains released Compose UI. I think Flutter has started to lose ground in cross-platform development.