What is Flutter And Why Choose Flutter in 2023?

Here is everything you should know, why do you need to choose Flutter in 2023? what is the future scope of Flutter developer? and also need to know what is the benefit of Flutter before using it for mobile apps development.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is actually a combination of two main parts. For one, it’s a UI framework, which is a fancy way of saying that Flutter is a collection of code packages and things you can use in your code to write cross-platform apps, cross-platform user interfaces, because that’s one of the main selling points of Flutter. 

And the second, with the flutter you can have a single codebase and yet generate apps for a broad variety of target platforms, and that’s a huge advantage, because without a solution like Flutter, you would have to learn different programming languages for different platforms because, historically, there wasn’t a single shared language that could have been used to target all these platforms. So that’s one of the main selling points of Flutter.

Flutter also gives you a collection of tools that you use in combination with your code to then actually convert your code that is able to run on these different target platforms. Because the code that you write in this single codebase does not work on these different platforms. Instead, it must be translated to machine code that does work on these different platforms. 

So for example, some specific machine code that does work on Android or that does work on iOS, and that translation is also done by Flutter. To be precise, it’s done by these Flutter tools that are part of the overall Flutter solution, if you want to call it like this, so that you have the things you use in your code, the packages you use in your code to build good-looking user interfaces and the tools that you need to then turn that single codebase into different code packages for these different target platforms. 

What is the benefit of Flutter?

Flutter is all about building those multi-platform apps based on that one single codebase and programming language so that you don’t have to learn multiple programming languages in order to build apps for multiple platforms. With Flutter, it’s just one programming language that you have to learn and use. 

So, Flutter is all about being able to build apps for different target platforms off a single code base. However, technically, Flutter itself is not a programming language. Flutter is a framework for building user interfaces with Dart, and Dart is the actual programming language. 

What’s a Framework?

Now, what’s a framework? Well, a framework is simply a collection of packages and utility functions, and functionalities, and generally speaking, things that you can use in your code. Like for example, some pre-built code that you can add to your code to make sure that a button is displayed on the screen. That’s what the Flutter framework gives you. 

Which language is used in Flutter?

Now, as mentioned, Dart is the actual programming language. Dart is a language developed by Google, which cannot just be used for building mobile or cross-platform apps with Flutter, but to be fair, Flutter is the main use case for Dart. and you use Flutter on top of Dart to build these cross platform apps. 

The Flutter tooling that’s also part of the overall Flutter solution, then will translate that Dart code that uses Flutter features to that machine code for the different target platforms. But technically, you as a developer are not just learning Flutter, but also Dart.

So by now, you know that Flutter is a thing you can use to write code in a single code base and translate that code to machine code for different target platforms. 

What is the future scope of Flutter developer?

Now, Flutter, as you can see, offers a broad variety of possible target platforms. For example, you can build mobile apps for iOS and Android. And initially, that was all that was supported by Flutter. And up to this day, I would argue, it’s still the primary focus of Flutter, or to put it, in other words, these platforms are best supported by Flutter.

You could also use Flutter for building web apps that run in modern browsers because these web apps use certain features that are not supported in older browsers. And you can also use Flutter to build desktop apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Now, what’s really important to understand and know regarding these target platforms is that you can, of course, write the code for all platforms no matter on which machine you are because it’s one shared code base. It’s one code for all these platforms. But when it comes to then actually producing these translated code packages for the different target platforms, you have some restrictions. Most importantly, you can only test and run iOS and macOS apps on macOS machines, windows apps on windows machines, and Linux apps on Linux machines. 

So, if you want to build an iOS app on windows, you can write the code for it because the code is the same, that’s one of the main selling points of Flutter as you learned, but you can’t actually generate the app itself that would then be uploaded to the app stores. For that, you need a macOS device. Of course, you can nonetheless, write all the code and then just copy that code to a macOS device to a MacBook, for example, once you’re ready to build it for the App Store.

But it’s worth knowing that on a windows machine, you can’t build those iOS or macOS apps. That’s important to know and understand. For Android and web apps, you have no restrictions, no matter if you’re on a macOS, Windows, or Linux machine, you cannot just write the code. But you can actually also generate the Android or web apps themselves based on that one code base on all these platforms.

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