All A Flutter - Google's Cross Platform App Framework Ready To Go
Written by Ian Elliot   
Friday, 22 June 2018

Google's Flutter is about to be released as a Version 1 product, ready for you to use. The question is should you be interested in a way to create almost native apps that run on iOS or Android? I suppose it depends on what "almost native" means?

Flutter is a strange project for Google to support. It is designed to allow the creation of apps that work on either iOS or Android. As Google only really has an interest in getting you to write Android apps, it is difficult to see what the motivation is to help Apple out with gaining apps.

googledart

The whole thing seems to be motivated by a desire to make the Dart language more useful. Dart was going to be Google's JavaScript replacement, but it didn't get the external support it needed so it was quietly sidelined. Then, at the start of the year, it seemed to spring back into life with Flutter, a cross-platform app development framework using Dart as its language.

Now, about six months later, we have a release preview, which must be something like a release candidate. There is also an official blog post talking the project up. In mentions a 50% increase in active Flutter users, entering the top 100 repos on GitHub and lots of user groups, meetings and events. More importantly some Flutter-based apps are appearing in the App Store and Play. While all this is good, it is still difficult to know if Flutter has a chance of taking off. An increase in interest isn't necessarily the same thing as a lot of interest.

The real question is why would you adopt Flutter?

The alternatives are to create a native app or build a web app. The problem with native apps is that they are harder to create and you need at least two, not that similar, implementations. Web apps are progressing in the sense of Progressive Apps, but they still have their problems. If you are prepared to take a non-standards-based approach then Flutter might be for you. It is an alternative to approaches like PhoneGap/Cordova. Where PhoneGap/Cordova wraps a standard HTML/JavaScript app in an extended browser to create something that looks like a native app, Flutter wraps a custom UI SDK/Dart in a C++ wrapper. Other obvious Flutter alternatives are React Native and Xamarin.

Developing with Flutter seems fairly easy. You can even use Android Studio with an add-in or an alternative IDE. Most of Flutter is concerned with creating a UI in code. You can create something that looks good on Android or iOS. Once you get beyond the UI, things get a bit more tricky. There is an interop module that provides ways of calling the native API from Dart. On the Dart side this works in a platform-independent way, but the cost is that you have to supply the native implementation of the function.

flutterstructure

 

So you can more-or-less invent your own platform implementation of the native APIs. This isn't that difficult, but it would be so much better if Flutter provided a standard regularization of the iOS and Android APIs - but this would be a huge project. More reasonable would be a core implementation of the API calls that are most used.

Because of this native API interop I'm not sure that you could build apps that are as sophisticated as full native apps - how would you use Android Fragments, for example? It seems to me that the ideal Flutter app is one that is mostly UI with a few native API calls to provide data.  Certainly, before committing to a Flutter app development project, you should make sure that you understand how the interop works and make sure you have both Android and iOS expertise to implement the native components of the project.

Flutter is about to be released and we have yet another way to create apps. It will be interesting to see how high it can go.

flutterdart

More Information

Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1

Related Articles

Google's Dart Reborn As Cross Platform App Language

Dart Changes Course - No Longer To Be Native In Chrome

The Astonishing Rise Of Dart

Ecma Approves Dart

Dart 1.8 Adds Support for App Engine and enums

Dart + Chromium = Dartium

Angular Partners With TypeScript

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

 

Banner


Linus On Linux 2024
04/09/2024

It is always interesting to hear what Linus Torvalds is thinking, and it's always about Linux, well nearly always. Find out what is going on before it happens in this recent interview.



Pulumi Envisions The Intelligent Cloud
18/09/2024

Today at PulumiUp, its 4th annual conference, Pulumi is announcing "Intelligent Cloud", its vision for AI-powered cloud infrastructure, and two new products, ESC GA and Insights 2.0.  


More News

kotlin book

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

Last Updated ( Wednesday, 13 November 2019 )