A Glimpse into The Future of Flutter Development

Flutter has quickly become a game-changer in cross-platform app development since its release by Google in 2017. With regular updates and continuous improvements, Flutter is shaping the future of app development, offering developers, teams, and businesses exciting new possibilities. The framework is renowned for its ability to create beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, desktop, and cloud-based platforms.

In May, Google introduced Flutter 3.0, which came with enhanced performance, stability, and new features, making it an even more powerful tool for development. Now is an ideal time for tech companies to tap into Flutter's potential—whether you’re looking to hire Flutter developers to strengthen your team or need experts to build your next product.

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Flutter’s Use in Industry

Being capable of targetting multiple platforms from just a single codebase is just one of several defining features that makes up the Flutter platform. It’s this cross-platform functionality that enables organizations to cut costs in design, development, testing, and maintenance with few genuine drawbacks.

While a truly unified codebase addressing multiple platforms with zero modifications has long been a vision for engineers and designers, it’s one that’s closer now than it’s ever been in the past. With the launch of Flutter 3 earlier this year, Google moved its Linux, Windows, and macOS support into stable release channels while expanding support for iOS and Android functionality.

Regardless of the target platform, Flutter continues to address the concerns of developers with exceptional interface design as a high priority for its apps.

This emphasis on strong design and exceptional functionality is something that firms across several industries have quickly picked up on. Carmaker’s BMW and Toyota have both deployed the technology to enhance their infotainment and management apps for their luxury car brands.

Both firms join technology giants Philips, and eBay in leaning on Flutter to improve the services they can provide to users.

Flutter’s Unique Advantage

Flutter achieves its goals with a UI design that relies on widgets to compose its front-end applications. It’s these building blocks that allow for highly customizable, performant, and attractive interfaces to be built to suit the needs of applications—something set to improve with the Future of Flutter.

Recent changes to the technology have brought more tooling, developer support, and performance improvements into the platform. These include an upgrade to Material 3 design, theme extensions, and improved Lint packages for developers.

By targetting a strategy that brings developers on-side with extensive documentation and tooling to promote better engineering—Google seems to have cracked the code to success when deploying a highly popular application framework.

It’s these performance, tooling, and resource improvements that are making the future of Flutter development one that is more rewarding and productive for developers in the years to come.

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Flutter’s Drawbacks

One of Flutter’s unique advantages is the Dart programming language. Highly productive, performant, and modern—it’s an exceptional tool for developers to have at their disposal in modern application development. Of course, it’s also the platform’s most significant drawback too.

First released over a decade ago Dart has had an initially slow uptake that has made its developers that bit harder to find. In comparison to technologies that lean on JavaScript, for example, there are far fewer resources, tools, and developers to bring into organizations.

The rarity of Dart developers and tools is something that is changing in recent years, however. Today, dart is one of the fastest-growing languages in application development—for some very good reasons.

As a language designed from the ground up with existing technologies and productive web development in mind, it’s one that is almost instantly familiar to developers approaching the technology for the first time.

JavaScript developers, for example, will already know many of its key concepts and ideas despite having never interacted with the language before. The result, for developers, is a shallow and friendly learning curve that is helping to speed up the adoption of the technology at incredible rates.

Flutter 3.0 and Dart

Alongside the release of Flutter 3.0 at Google I/O this year, Google also unveiled recent additions to Dart 2.17.

Significant changes to the language include improvements to productivity and platform integrations to make the language even more effective for its developers.

These changes build on those unveiled with last year’s launch of Flutter 2.0, unveiling null safety and the Dart FFI for developers. This year, Dart’s changes create opportunities for reducing boilerplate code and making more efficient use of the language.

Some of the most notable changes to come with Dart 2.17 include:

• Support for members within enums
• Support for inheriting initializers from a superclass
• Named arguments ordering independent
• Additional productivity tools for developers
• Broadened platform integration and support

Flutter Vs Frameworks Vs Native

As with any tool, technology, or platform the future of Flutter apps won’t be developed in a vacuum. Many competing frameworks are chasing after and even surpassing the technology on their own merits. In today’s technology landscape even using no framework at all is a viable option for developers with native apps being more than worthy of consideration.

On features alone, many competing frameworks can offer some of the same advantages as Flutter. Both React Native and Xamarin, for example, offer cross-platform mobile development, native code rendering, and outstanding support for development tools. Both are already wildly popular amongst developers and have a large base of engineering talent. It’s Flutter’s feature set as more than a framework that makes it stand out amongst each of its strongest competitors.

While React Native is a JavaScript framework that generates native components to meet each platform it targets, Flutter is a development platform that draws its own rendering views.

The difference between the two approaches becomes more and more apparent as the size, resolution, and screen layouts diverge amongst devices and platforms. In many cases, generating native components that render accurately across wildly varying devices is all but impossible and highly likely to result in minor issues.

Most tech industry veterans will remember the early days of bug-filled, broken, and hacked-together mobile apps of the early 2010s. Glitches, bugs, and user workarounds were common in production apps of the time. Few will want the future of app development to look like that too.

At best, these UI issues can dampen the professional look and feel of well-designed apps. At worst, they can inhibit crucial functionality.

By drawing its own widgets, Flutter guarantees consistent performance across devices. Using the platform’s rendering engine, widgets and components are rendered for devices at 120 frames per second. The result is a ready-made boost to apps valuing reliability and design as a primary component of application engineering.

There are scenarios too, where neither frameworks nor Flutter are ideal solutions to every engineering challenge. When lightweight applications are absolutely necessary—in deploying instant apps, for example, then the heavyweight features of either Flutter or mobile app frameworks are likely to hinder more than help.

Native apps step into this role as an ideal fit instead.

With Flutter, developers are provided with a great deal of options and abilities to create robust, well-designed, and fully featured applications into the future. That future, however, should include a keen eye on dropping into native development and keeping on top of each platform’s ecosystems too.

To help manage your teams and reach that future using Flutter, take a look at our article on The Do’s & Don’ts of Managing an Outsourced Flutter Development Team.

Flutter’s Bright Future

With the release of Flutter 3.0, Google is announcing its continued support, investment, and dedication to the Flutter platform for many years to come. The list of target platforms open for Flutter development continues to expand as fast as the features and productivity of the technology continues to improve.

Regardless of the platform, you are building on, the app you are creating, or the audience you intend to build for—Flutter will be a technology to turn to for the foreseeable future of application development.

FAQs

Q1. Will Flutter have a Future?

Flutter is a technology that continues to grow year on year since its release in 2017. The platform has received continuous strong investment from Google and is seeing extensive use in both Google’s own technologies as well as that of major players throughout the tech industry. Today, Flutter is being used in Google Stadia and adWords apps in addition to its use in producing Google’s Assistant.

In addition to Flutter’s use in mobile apps, the latest release of the platform Flutter 3.0 has moved desktop and cloud application support into a stable state with improved tooling and applications.

This investment and development from Google is a strong indicator that the platform has a strong future ahead of it from industry investment alone. In addition, the increased uptake and adoption of the platform have grown a strong user community that contributes features, maintenance, and updates to its code that should only strengthen its case.

Q2. Is Flutter popular?

Flutter is an immensely popular cross-platform app development tool and among the most popular technology currently available. Since the platform’s release in 2017, it has seen a remarkable explosion in popularity that has seen it surpass React native in popularity recently.

Flutter developers appreciate the technology so highly due to its simplicity, performance, and platform-agnostic abilities.

As a technology that is easy to learn, highly scalable, and offers end-users an exceptional user experience the advantages of Flutter development should see the technology continue to rise in popularity for some time to come.