7 Reasons Flutter Became the Best Choice to Develop Startup Mobile Apps for Real Estate

I have been developing mobile apps for 6 years. During this time, I have worked on native platforms (iOS, Android) and cross-platform development technologies (PhoneGap/Cordova). Recently, I started to consider using Flutter in one of my projects that the team was working on.

It’s not like we needed some radically new technology to solve our business cases; however, my curiosity took me pretty far. Now I am really impressed with how Flutter works in practice. Here are 7 reasons why it became the best choice even if you don’t need something radically new:

1. Dart is Easy to Learn

When I decided to dive deep into technology behind Flutter, I found Dart to be a pretty easy-to-understand programming language. If you like object-oriented and functional paradigms, feel free to create beautiful and maintainable code.

Keep in mind that instead of learning one language (i.e., Swift/Java), you’re going to learn two with Flutter: Dart and its standard library. All in all, the learning curve is not steep at all if you work with mobile development for some time already.

2. Hot Reloading Eliminates Fear of Code Breaks

I have been using hot reloading since I started working on native projects, so it is nothing new for me personally; however, my teammates don’t frequently use it. Sometimes we need to make a small fix, and it takes some time for us to refresh the application.

The main thing about hot reloading is that you don’t need to restart the app and lose changes in code (especially when working on back-end development). The second thing is that there are no problems with your emulator. Reloads finish almost instantly – even faster than on my physical devices! If you have not used hot reloading yet, I highly recommend trying it out. There are plenty of articles around explaining how it works behind the scenes.

3. Flutter Material Components Provide an Awesome UI Development Experience

I must admit that at first, I was skeptical about having just one design system instead of two. On the native platforms, we use two different stylesheets (one for iOS and another one for Android). At the same time, the Material Components library is pretty well documented. If you have a designer who can help you to create a Flutter theme for your app – it’s going to be a breeze.

4. Outstanding Performance

Performance is always critical in mobile apps development. That said, I have been impressed by how smooth animations from both versions of Material Components work. In addition to that, everything feels fast even when scrolling! Although I don’t share some benchmarking info here, I am quite confident that Flutter provides outstanding performance because it heavily uses code optimized for AOT compilation instead of JIT approach while using standard Dart.

5. Flutter Supports Dart 2 Language Features

Dart 2 is a totally new language which brings in great features (i.e., strong typing, function cascades). At the same time, it is still fully backward compatible with Dart 1; however, if you decide to use some of my favorite features from Dart 2 like async/await – you can do that without any issues:

Future<void> fetchData() async {

    await _httpClient .get(url);

}

6. Building UI Is Fun and Easy! No More Outdated Layouts!

Creating layouts in native iOS/Android apps can be challenging sometimes because there are so many different sizes of screens and resolutions to take care of. And what’s more – layouts for iOS and Android apps are different in case you need to keep your user interface consistent.

With Flutter, the situation is really different! You don’t have to think twice about how your layout will look on small screen or in landscape mode. The only thing that matters when building layouts in Flutter is widget placement in widget build function called inside Scaffold.

7. App Size is Really Small; UI Runs Smoothly Even on Older Devices

If you want to create an app which is small in size (i.e., the best user experience) and runs smooth even on older generation devices, I highly recommend paying attention to Flutter because it compiles everything into ARM code. There are no bytecodes or dex files included in your APK/IPA file; thus, you can be sure that there will be no problems with outdated devices compatibility.