When starting to develop a custom application, one of the most important aspects is the timeliness of the technologies used in the implementation. It is true to say that in every field of the world, new technologies arrive, evolve, and then become obsolete. This is the natural cycle of life.
However, in the fast-paced world of IT, where market competitors must work with tomorrow’s technologies yesterday, something doesn’t necessarily have to be bad to make that cycle in as little as two years.
Why is this relevant to business decision making?
To keep a smartphone app up to date, new feature requests arise from time to time, we need to keep up with market changes and innovations, or even just the App Store/Play store calls us to update our app every few years. This requires a professional implementation team who is actively working with this technology and can touch the app. Unfortunately, in the last few years you can find newer technologies where rewriting is already suggested in a similar situation.
But what is Flutter?
Flutter is an open-source framework developed by Google that came into the hands of developers in May 2017. Over the last 5 years, the platform has seen a huge expansion. Professionals in general love working with it because it’s beautiful, fast, productive to use, our source code can run on smartphone, web or even as a desktop app, and not to mention it has huge community support. According to GitHub statistics, Flutter is the 3rd largest open-source project in terms of community support. And Google estimates that today there are more than 5 million developers using Flutter and more than 700,000 applications based on Flutter around the world.
For years, React Native has dominated the market for cross-platform applications. There have been a lot of articles about how Flutter is expected to take over from React Native sooner or later. Statistics show that this has happened. If you look at the GitHub community, at the analysis of forum topics, you can see that Flutter is the biggest Cross-Platform Framework today in terms of new applications.
It should be noted that there are probably more React Native developers working in our country than Flutter developers these days, but the Hungarian Flutter community is also growing very fast.
There are currently 27,000 Flutter-based apps in the mobile app stores, which have reached more than 13 trillion downloads. 4.01% of all apps available on the market are Flutters, but newly uploaded apps account for 9.19%. And for top-ranked apps, the figure is 3%.
What are the prospects for the future?
That’s what no one can know for sure. It is likely that the community and the platform will continue to evolve and be further optimized. As we wrote, Flutter has been released for the web as well as for desktop platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS). On desktop platforms, the feedback is already amazingly good, especially in terms of performance. So it could well revolutionize the market for desktop applications too. There are already some rumors that if Google succeeds in launching its new operating system Fuchsia, which is being developed to replace Android (and especially the Linux kernel running underneath it), Flutter will be supported from launch. If this really happens, we won’t have to worry about our precious source code being affected by various compatibility issues.
In view of the above, we can conclude that the platform has enough developers, and we can expect the attention to grow. Development is happening at an amazing pace and the future is ahead. We see many good years ahead for Flutter.
Thinking about smartphone application development?
