What is Flutter?

What is Flutter?

The first thing that I will talk about is what exactly is Flutter.

Let’s take an example. Let’s just say I’m Android Developer and I created a banking app that has a variety of functionalities & people just loved it but this app is only available on Android.

So, every other day I got messages like “When it will be available on iOS?”, & at some point, I made up my mind to build the same app on iOS but first, I have to learn Swift & StoryBoard or SwiftUI which will take some time to learn & after that, I will be available to launch my App on Apple AppStore.

This is great for the users that it is finally available on both platforms which are Android & iOS but for me, it means I have to learn several programming languages and logic to maintain those apps for any bug fixes and this is really a hectic task. So you can see that for one app, I have to work a lot on both code bases which is a lot of work down the line & it’s basically double the amount of work that I used to have.

UI / UX Issues

Also, there will be some design issues like when we click on the zip code text box then the keyboard appears instead of Numpad which is a bad user experience. Also, there can be a contrast in the app in which in iOS, the same apps will look different because it will be made with the help of storyboard or SwiftUI and in android, we will either use XML or jetpack compose. Now here’s where Flutter comes in.

Screens Everywhere

We see more and more screens everywhere like Screens in ATM Machines, screens in your car, screen in your mirror & they all have different aspect ratios & different screen sizes. So, the flutter creates something that can intelligently allow a developer to design an app for all of these different types of screens.

Pre-Built Widgets

Flutter is simply a toolkit that makes it easy for a developer to design beautiful interfaces for all kinds of devices & it comes with a whole bunch of pre-built widgets that make it easy to layout your apps such as laying out your app with containers, rows, and columns. How to layout button, where should be the appBar & if you are familiar with web development, you can see that it actually borrows some of the concepts from web designs where you can have things that are centered or have padding & margins.

What flutter wants is to have a blank window & it will render the design with some lines of code and whatever animations or interactions you want. So this means that instead of making a separate app for iOS the apple way & android app the Android way, you can simply build an app via Flutter such as FloatingActionButton or Alert Dialog & you can simply put this in your app, no matter which platform you are working on.

Flutter team even designed widgets that will look for the platform e.g. your pop-up menu will look like this on iOS app but you can also specify that if your app will be used on Android then they should look like this, making your app look like it was created in a native way. This is how Flutter works. We will see lots of different widgets in near future. In short, Flutter makes it incredibly easy to build beautiful interfaces for our app using widgets & we can customize our widgets with just few lines of code.

Let’s see these things in practical but first, we have to download IDE and Flutter SDK to build our app. So, I will see you in next module.