27 Oct 2022 5 min read
Why I Chose Flutter for Hybrid Development
By Vikas Dwivedi
Android & Hybrid Lead
Flutter Development
Hybrid development has started to gain virtues over native development in the past few years. The reason is simple: low development cost, native-like experience and an easy to maintain single codebase for multiple platforms.
When it comes to which framework you should use, two of the most popular and trending choices would be React Native and Flutter.
Flutter is all about widgets. Super comfy widgets.
I have chosen Flutter for all my hybrid mobile app developments and I'm going to tell you why.
I've been a Native Android developer for almost 5 years before I started developing with Flutter. Android being owned by Google and Flutter being founded by Google as well, it happened to be quite natural in the first place but that wasn't of course the only reason.
Flutter, a UI tool kit for development
Flutter is defined as a UI tool kit for development. If someone asks me a question about what Flutter is? I would say "Flutter is all about Widgets”.
Flutter is also about quick development, Widgets in Flutter make most of your work easy. They are pre-coded elements which you can customize using their properties.
Let's take an example of a Text widget.
Copy
1Text('Hello World,textAlign: TextAlign.center,overflow: TextOverflow.ellipsis,
2style: const TextStyle(fontWeight: FontWeight.bold),)If you want to add a Text in the UI, you can simply use the text widget and customize it using its properties like textAlign for alignment, overflow to handle the overflow text and style to control its styling like fontWeight, fontFamily, color etc.
There are many such widgets available in Flutter to match your various use cases of design. Once you are familiar with their properties, you really can develop an app in no time.
Stateless and Stateful
Flutter allows you to create your own widgets by extending the two major types of widgets: Stateless and Stateful. Widgets help in quick development but they also come with another advantage which is less code and more work.
As I have previously mentioned, widgets are pre-coded elements so they help us complete a lot of functionality in lesser code compared to writing native code.
Let's take an example with the below screen:
Let's look at the code for the same:
Copy
1class MyHomePage extends StatelessWidget {
2const MyHomePage({Key? key, required this.title}) : super(key: key);
3final String title;
4@override
5Widget build(BuildContext context) {
6return Scaffold(
7appBar: AppBar(
8title: Text(title),
9),
10bottomNavigationBar: BottomNavigationBar(items: const [BottomNavigationBarItem(icon: Icon(Icons.home), label: 'Home'),
11BottomNavigationBarItem(icon: Icon(Icons.person), label: 'Profile')],
12),
13body: const Center(child: Text('Hello World'),
14),
15);
16}
17}So the above screen contains an App Bar, a bottom bar and a Text Widget.
All this in 17 lines of code shows you how fast and efficient development is with Flutter.
The built-in widgets are powerful and help you develop fast while writing less amount of code.
Packages & External Libraries
To support more functionalities in an app, Flutter offers a lot of packages i.e external libraries available to help developers add specific functionality to their hybrid applications. You can go through these libraries on https://pub.dev/.
To conclude Flutter is a very easy choice for hybrid development. Its developer community is growing really fast and newer versions with more functionalities keep getting released regularly.
Now that being said, many of my friends are on React & Javascript and have easily switched to React Native to develop production level mobile applications. I might be talking about that in a future article if you give me a high-five on this one!
#Flutter
#Hybrid
#Mobiledevelopment
#Librairies
#Widgets
#Developercommunity
#Android
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By Vikas Dwivedi
Android & Hybrid Lead
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