As you all may know "Flutter is Google's UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase."
For the longest time(about a year now) I've been thinking of re-discovering my skills with regards to Mobile Development. A few years ago I had taken courses in Android Development, and I found that the learning curve(especially for working with Device features) was slightly steep, especially if you were a beginner.
Anyway, I took a couple of courses and kept enduring on the journey. However, I began to lose interest as soon as I realised that I would have to work twice as hard to transfer my energy into building the same application for iOS devices using swift or Objective-C. I was not prepared to spend sleepless nights learning these skills. I'm a Software Engineer, but I still have a life.
I began looking at alternatives for achieving the goal of maintaining one codebase for multiple platforms. In the past I had looked at hybrid solutions such as Phonegap, Apache Cordova, and Ionic. In my opinion (and at the time of my experiments with these technologies) these were not as easy to understand as per the documentation, and I always found myself asking how I could interact with various native features of the device.
Anyway, fast-forward into the future and I'm at a similar crossroad, but now with different technologies. It was now a battle between Facebook's React-Native(which is highly used at my current employer) and Google's Flutter, which was a bit of a young contender in this case. React-Native has a strong community backing because it's slightly more popular. I also consulted the Engineers at work, who have experience building native applications in React-Native, and they motivated me to stick with the popular and more used framework.
Naturally, one would be inclined to take the road more travelled... But, I decided to give Flutter a try before I did that. Guess What!? I loved Flutter!!! I haven't stopped learning it ever since I started reading the documentation. My experience with it has been a great one. I'm constantly taking online courses to expand my knowledge using Flutter, and with each day that passes by, I'm learning a great deal.
These are the reasons I love Flutter:
=> It's easy to learn and get into. The first App you Scaffold with its "create" command is easy to understand and shows you how easy it is.
=> Everything is centred around Widgets and the syntax is easy on the eye of a beginner.
=> It's hot-reload feature makes building Mobile Apps a breeze.
I could go on about all its features and perks of being backed by Google, but I think I'd just spoil it for you.
In conclusion, I'd urge you to take the road less travelled, and in doing exactly that, you may just find exactly what you need. This article is not aimed at discouraging Software Developers/Engineers to pick Flutter over React Native or any other mobile Technology. It's rather aimed at curious minds who are willing to explore Tools that suite their needs. I find that Flutter satisfies my need to venture fully into Mobile Development. I've attached a basic example of an App I pieced together in less than 30 mins. Click HERE to check it out.
My Quick Dummy App -> https://github.com/TheMorgz/gym_program
Further Reading Below:
