SAVING ON DEVELOPMENT COSTS OF YOUR APP, WHO DOESN’T WANT THAT?
Trends follow one another at great speed. This has made available a wide range of platforms on which a company can profile itself. Think old-fashioned desktop applications, the Internet, apps and the new IoT solutions. So to remain as visible as possible as a company, it is important to be present on different platforms.
60% Of the world’s population currently use their mobile phones to explore the Internet and thus have a smartphone on which apps can be installed. In the Netherlands, it is as high as 87%. The main operating systems for smartphones are Android and iOS. Any self-respecting organization therefore develops native apps that work flawlessly on both platforms. In practice, that actually always means duplication of effort. The cross-platform solution Flutter offers a fantastic answer to this. In this blog, Rockstar Sjoerd takes you through:
- Why should you go cross-platform?
- The disadvantages of other cross-platform solutions
- The 6 + 1 benefits of Flutter
WHY YOU SHOULD GO CROSS-PLATFORM SOON
Since the first iOS and Android smartphones came on the market, a big gap arose immediately: The programming languages and overall design of apps that can be developed on these phones are completely different, in other words: difficult, time-consuming and cumbersome. Although there are now plenty of good developers who have mastered both platforms just fine, building such a native app often takes twice as much time. In addition, there is an increased risk of errors in the code and reduced overall knowledge of the project between Android and iOS developers.
In addition to apps, a website version is often developed for users who are not on their smartphones. This brings yet another new platform.
THE CHALLENGE OF OTHER CROSSPLATFORM SOLUTIONS
To bridge the large gap, there has been a proliferation of cross-platform solutions in recent years. The goal of these solutions is to be able to share as much code as possible between Android and iOS in particular. This significantly reduces the development time for each platform and thus should result in fewer bugs. Almost all cross-platform solutions to date have had one or more of the following major drawbacks:
- Danger of ceasing development
- Less speed
- More energy consumption
- Not consistent across all platforms
- Limited possibilities
- Instability in ongoing development due to critical platform changes
Fortunately, that is over from now on!
SUCCESSFUL WITH FLUTTER
Flutter is the cross-platform solution. We will describe step by step in this blog why the above disadvantages do not apply to Flutter and try to give you an idea of the power of Flutter.
Benefit 1: Unprecedented growth for a secure future
Flutter is a so-called framework from Google, which is taking over the cross-platform world at an extremely fast pace. Google already uses Flutter in many of its own apps (for example, Google Ads) and there are also many big names already using Flutter to speed up their app development:
- BMW
- Ebay
- Alibaba
- Groupon
- Sonos
- Philips
- Greentea
Google’s latest big talk is largely about Flutter, in short: They plan to conquer the cross-platform world. In addition, Google has regularly indicated its focus on continued development in the coming period.
Benefit 2: Speed and high tech
To get users to stay in the App you will want to exude as much speed as possible. We all know a story that was sprinkled with comments about App speed when the party first went cross-platform.
Flutter is actually a graphical layer capable of producing exactly the same result on different platforms. The developer writes the complete app in one language, which in turn is converted to the native code of the platform itself. As a result, the app feels like it was written completely in its own language.
Benefit 3: Save on energy without compromising
Because of the clever way it’s set up, your phone doesn’t need to refresh the screen relatively much, and you’ll notice that in your phone’s battery consumption. Flutter uses a similar percentage as Native apps in terms of processor and memory, and in some cases will do even better.
Benefit 4: Guaranteed look and feel
The apps will look and feel exactly the same on all platforms. I myself (Sjoerd van den Berg, author of this blog) wrote a complete app which I always tested only on iOS. Later, my boss asked if I could show the Android version. I was able to launch this one right away and it looked exactly the same as on iOS. Best of all, you can vary by platform if desired, should you want to show a different date selection on Android and iOS, for example.
Benefit 5: Unlimited possibilities
Then, should there be something that is so platform-dependent that it is not in Flutter by default, you have the option of writing it in the native language. Then you write a minimal shell in Flutter to call this code and you’re done as a developer. In addition to the standard options already available, there is also a huge list of plugins available which almost always provide you with what you need.
Benefit 6: Stability in continued development
Of course, as soon as updates take place in the cross platform, you don’t want to have to throw out all your code and start over because of the “breaking changes” phenomenon. That, of course, is a financial no-go. Flutter has been stable and backwards compatible since version 1.0, currently (when this was written) we are already on version 2.2 and the apps still look pretty much the same. Google first tests changes on their own apps before making a release, this way they keep the required changes minimal.
Bonus benefit: uninhibited opportunities
As a bonus, since the 2.0 release, there is an option to export to web. So you can now offer a variant of your app to users who don’t want/can’t install the app. In addition, they have come a long way in supporting Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.
