Google expands its popular UI Framework Flutter from just mobile to multi-platform
By: Jay Singh
Tags: Flutter App Development, Mobile App Development

Enterprises have witnessed a dramatic evolution in terms of emerging technologies as they have made a global presence with online platforms. While they began it with the websites, they have now turned towards mobile application platforms to make a wide reach to their target audience.

What remains noteworthy here, is the presence of various platforms and the enterprises trying their best to become proactively present on each one of them in order to capture a larger market share.

Although one might assume that businesses can still make a good reach by limiting themselves to certain platforms and save on the time and efforts that are put in for being omnipresent. But as you have a closer look, you might find that the audience has not restricted itself to any platform, instead, they use these as per their convenience and want to be present on multiple platforms at once.

This has been the major reason behind the enterprises competing with another to show a strong presence not just at one place but everywhere. With time, it is seen that multi-platform and cross-platform compatibility has been substantial to both the enterprises and their audience.

The rise of Flutter

As these terms became the buzz words, Flutter gained its prominence in a very short period, by becoming a unanimous popular choice among the application developers. Such has been the response, that startups and fortune 500 companies alike migrated to this newly emerged cross-platform application development tool.

Even as the LinkedIn study states Flutter as one of the Fastest growing skills among Software Engineers, and Stakoverflow states it as one of the most loved frameworks by the developer community in its 2019 survey, Flutter has proved its mettle in a very short time since its inception.

Everyone rushed to build highly functional and likewise beautiful mobile applications using Flutter to woo their target audience spread across iOS and Android by delivering class apart user experience (UX).

As the problem for multiple platforms on mobile got sorted with the Flutter, that offered a single code for an application on both iOS and Android platforms, Web applications were still untouched and required separate efforts to build and maintain.

Flutter: From just mobile to multi-platform

Flutter which was termed as the future of app development, lived by its name in the truest sense only recently, when Google announced the expansion of its app development from just mobile to being multi-platform. On May 7th, 2019, Google I/O announced the new version of Flutter i.e. Flutter 1.5.

With the release of Flutter 1.5, Google hinted towards a major beginning in the direction of its ambitious Hummingbird project, that aims to build Flutter for the web. Having this in their 2019 plan, Google has made a mind to mark the untouched territory of the web, leaving React Native way behind in this power tussle.

The foundation for web platform was laid long before, since Flutter was always architected as a portable UI toolkit. Now it even runs on Windows, Mac, Fuschia and Raspberry Pi. It is due to Dart, which includes compilers that are of production-quality for both the native machine code and JavaScript.

It was now just to replace the Skia-based graphics engine and text renderer with the web-platform equivalents.

It seems to get sorted for the web platform with a few things like:

> fast 60 frames per second performance for interactive graphics,

> consistent behavior on various platforms,

> high productivity tooling kit that could integrate with the current development patterns and

> the support for core web features across all of the major browsers

These areas are still witnessing development and there’s still much left to be achieved to build a full-fledged web development platform. But on the brighter side, we’re hopeful that Google will continue with the research and investments in building a proper cross-platform app development toolkit which will include web as well.

Things have started to make a constructive move towards web and we can see the early results as the image below.

Flutter web demo running on Chrome, Firefox and Safari

Flutter for web resembles a lot in its architecture to its mobile version, and you might easily adapt to the web version if you are well aware of the mobile version of Flutter. Only the dart:ui library, have different bindings for the web version, where the Skia engine bindings of mobile are replaced by DOM and canvas, and the dart code is compiled to JavaScript for the web.

Flutter for web Architecture

Well, although it is just the first step in the direction of the web platform, it is not very far when Flutter applications can run on web in full swing owing its success to all the efforts that go in the present.

On a closing note

Having said that, one cannot deny the fact that Flutter has come a long way in a very small time, outperforming every time since its inception, giving a run for the money to the already existing cross-platform application development tools.

As the businesses are already making a move towards Flutter, it is a very decisive step to migrate the applications to Flutter and leverage the benefits it extends, while enjoying the added advantage of time over the competitors.

Planning to develop a high performing, multi-platform application with amazing UI for your business, then feel free to write us at hello@citrusleaf.in or contact us and we’d love t to help you with our innovative and reliable Flutter App Development Services.