Building cross-platform mobile apps with Flutter is quickly becoming one of the most popular frameworks. Flutter is a modern reactive architecture with a rich widget set and easy-to-learn Dart language that allows you to build beautiful, high-performance apps for iOS and Android.
Key Reasons Why Flutter Has Leading Choice
Here are the key reasons why Flutter has emerged as the leading choice for cross-platform development:
i. Fast Development and Prototyping
If you are thinking about Flutter app development, working with the top Flutter app development companies will help you harness these powerful capabilities. Develop in your browser (or another IDE) using Flutter’s hot reload feature to see changes made instantly without the need to restart your app or lose state. It is a rapid iteration that enables the developer to experiment and test their ideas freely. This means that Flutter halves the time it takes to develop compared to native development.
Also, it has a declarative programming style, making it so fast to build UIs compared to react frameworks. Flutter has a huge widget set and abundant widgets that you can use to quickly mock up ideas and build beautiful UIs with less code. With this, Flutter is perfect for prototyping and building MVP versions of your app.
ii. Expressive and Feature-Rich UI
Flutter’s layered architecture and powerful widget set give developers complete control over the look, feel, and behavior of their UIs. Widgets are customizable down to pixel level while still being high-level enough for quick development.
This combination of control and speed allows Flutter developers to craft advanced UI that easily flows with transitions, animated elements, hero animations, and more. As a result, Flutter apps often exhibit smoother interactions and motion designs compared to other cross-platform options.
iii. Near-Native Performance
Flutter compiles all the way down to native ARM code rather than using bridges or interpreters like other cross-platform options. This ahead-of-time compilation unlocks exceptional rendering smoothness at 120 FPS and near-instant startup times.
As a result, Flutter apps exhibit native performance with buttery animation quality and quick load times, even on lower-end devices. Flutter’s graphics are rendered using the native Skia 2D graphics library, ensuring perfect pixel fidelity during animations and gestures. This level of native performance simply isn’t possible with other hybrid frameworks.
iv. Access to Native Features and SDKs
While Flutter offers tons of ready-made widgets and packages, you still get full access to all the native platform SDKs and APIs. This allows you to add device-specific features or reuse existing Java/Kotlin/ObjC code.
Platform channels act as message conduits between Dart and the native languages. You can leverage platform channels to call native code for features like NFC, biometrics authentication, augmented reality, and machine learning. This flexible interoperability unlocks capabilities beyond Flutter’s core while still retaining most UI code.
v. Hot Reload for Faster Development
Flutter’s stateful hot reload feature turbocharges development cycles by updating code changes instantly without restarting your app or losing the UI state. This enables fluid, iterative coding and experimentation unmatched by native platforms.
Hot reload works by directly injecting updated source code files into the running Dart VM rather than doing a full application recompile. This lightning-fast feedback loop immerses you in the creative flow during coding sessions. The visual state is retained across hot reloads to avoid losing context.
vi. Widget Catalog for Rapid UI Building
Flutter ships with a vast catalog of customizable UI widgets for all interface needs. Complex widgets like infinite grids, expandable cards, and alert dialogs require just a few configuration lines. This rich set of ready-made widgets focuses coding efforts on business logic.
Flutter’s functional-reactive style makes state changes and data propagation transparent through the widget tree. Widgets auto-update and rebuild efficiently when state changes occur higher up in the hierarchy. This model lends itself perfectly to quickly mocking up and experimenting with UIs.
vii. Dart Language Easier Than Java or Swift
Flutter uses the easy-to-learn Dart programming language, which features a simplified syntax without cumbersome annotations or memory management. Developers find Dart more productive than Java and Swift since its declarative style requires less code to accomplish tasks.
Dart’s AOT compilation to native code ensures blazing performance, complete with advanced language features like generics, async/await syntax, and lexical scopes. The Dart VM’s garbage collection keeps memory tight without the risk of crashes. These language attributes make Flutter suitable for large, complex, mission-critical apps.
viii. Excellent Documentation and Support
Flutter maintains outstanding technical documentation for learning the framework, designing UIs, and implementing platform capabilities. The docs offer runnable code samples, cookbooks, API references, and conceptual guides.
Beyond the docs, Flutter offers an engaged community of developers ready to help on StackOverflow and GitHub. And Google actively develops and supports Flutter with a fast-release cadence, ensuring a bright future for the framework.
Flutter’s Layered Reactive Architecture
Flutter follows a modern reactive programming architecture centered around three core layers:
i. Framework Layer
This base layer contains Flutter’s low-level rendering and gesture detection engines, which interface with each platform’s graphics and input systems. The framework layer handles pixel manipulation, event handling, accessibility support, and platform interop.
This layer doesn’t interact directly with the developers. It’s responsible for bootstrapping and connecting to native UIs.
ii. Engine Layer
The engine layer sits on top of the framework and is responsible for the foundational building blocks to build the UIs. Key components at this layer include:
- Dart runtime and just-in-time compiler.
- Flutter’s 2D rendering engine is written in C++, allowing it to quickly output to hardware.
- The compositing and animation infrastructure.
- Graphics libraries, text rendering libraries.
Taking widget trees and turning them into optimized native UI layer constructs is the job of the engine layer. It also takes care of recompiling and hot reloading while you are developing the project to make development fun.
iii. Widget Layer
The topmost widget layer is where developers spend most of their time. This layer contains Flutter’s reactive UI building blocks, including:
- Widget classes for material design and iOS-style interfaces.
- Event and gesture handlers for touch interactions.
- The renderer displays widget trees on the screen.
- State management for reactive data flow.
Developers compose UIs using Flutter’s widget catalog combined with custom widgets coded in Dart. The widget layer handles constructing visual interfaces, detecting interactions, managing state changes, and rerendering data updates.
This clean reactive architecture centered on widgets is the secret behind Flutter’s speed and expressiveness. It eliminates unnecessary layers of abstraction for fluid coding with hot reload support.
Flutter’s Near-Native Performance
Flutter achieves consistently high frame rates and smooth UI animations across Android and iOS through its use of the Skia 2D graphics engine and ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation.
i. Skia 2D Graphics Engine
Flutter renders all UI components using Skia, an open-source 2D graphics library that leverages GPU hardware acceleration for drawing shapes and graphics. Skia is well-optimized for performant vector graphics, using instructions tuned specifically for mobile devices.
Most mobile UI operations stack layers of shapes, icons, text, and images that perfectly map Skia’s architecture. Flutter avoids the need for intermediate scene representations or excessive data conversion by directly leveraging efficient underlying graphics layers.
ii. Ahead-of-Time Compilation
AOT compilation transforms Dart code into native machine code at build time as opposed to relying on just-in-time JavaScript compilation at runtime used by alternatives like React Native. This ahead-of-time approach ensures lightning-fast startup and consistent frame rates.
The Dart compiler first converts Flutter code into an intermediate binary format optimized for fast loading. Then, at runtime, the Dart VM quickly generates optimized native code specialized to the target device’s architecture.
Flutter combines its reactive-style widget framework with a compiled codebase to achieve better runtime performance compared to JavaScript-based solutions. Everything still hot-reloads smoothly thanks to Flutter’s stateful architecture.
iii. Results: Near-Native Performance
These architectural decisions unlock exceptional performance nearly identical to native development:
- Startup in under a second. Cold startup optimized to run incredibly fast on both iOS and Android.
- 120 FPS animation rates. Smoother UI animations with fewer dropped frames than native.
- Fluid scrolling. Recycling and optimizing scrolling widgets for lag-free lists.
- Low memory usage. Efficient memory footprint with Dart’s garbage collection.
So, in summary, Flutter has all the capabilities needed to build complex custom UIs while also delivering a native-quality experience.
Top Flutter App Development Companies
As Flutter adoption grows exponentially, a vibrant partner ecosystem has emerged to help companies build Flutter apps. Here are some of the top Flutter app development shops leading the way:
Langate. A mobile-first development firm renowned for leveraging Flutter’s capabilities for startups and enterprises alike. Langate has delivered sophisticated, high-performance solutions covering fintech, media, healthcare, and other verticals. Their specialty includes integrating Flutter with cloud data services and machine learning.
Appetiser. A mobile agency focused specifically on Flutter with over 200 apps delivered. Appetiser builds beautiful Flutter apps optimized for smoothness across iOS and Android. They partner closely with startups and SMBs to prototype and scale projects.
Touch Instinct. An Eastern European dev shop has been building Flutter apps for all industries since 2019. Touch Instinct delivers pixel-perfect UIs honed through rigorous QA testing. They focus on performance tuning and dynamic animated interfaces.
OpenXcell. An India-based Flutter specialist with superb design-development skills crafting apps for startups and enterprises. OpenXcell has extensive expertise in building custom plugins and contributing to Flutter open source.
PurpleTalk. A Latin American development firm focused on high-quality Flutter apps featuring advanced functionalities. PurpleTalk builds mobile solutions for cutting-edge use cases like machine learning, computer vision, 3D, and augmented reality.
With its speed, expressiveness, and multi-platform capabilities, Flutter has attracted some of the industry’s top talent to leverage its strengths for clients. These partners form a skilled ecosystem pushing Flutter forward each day.
Final Words
Features like hot reload, native performance, and a huge widget catalog make Flutter the fastest way to build cross-platform apps ever. Flutter enables startups to reach the web and desktop from a single Dart codebase while enabling them to keep the velocity and accelerate the experimentation as they scale.
Flutter is the ultimate framework for startups to build their ambitions efficiently, with mobile development timelines cut in half compared to native, faster prototyping, and easier maintenance. Flutter is the leading choice for today’s innovative companies due to its speed, expressiveness, and multi-platform capabilities.
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