Are you thinking of building a mobile application that provides a native user experience on both the Android and iOS platforms? If creating an app for the iOS platform is your immediate requirement and you don’t want to miss out on the Android users, you might consider using the Flutter framework. However, the question "Is Flutter the right choice for iOS app development?" might still be lurking in your mind. Yes, Flutter is a great option as it goes well with today’s market trend and matches your budget constraints. Furthermore, apps built using Flutter deliver the look and feel that native apps provide.
History of Flutter
Initially, the cross-platform development framework was created for the Android platform and was released in 2017. The goal was to enable both the Android and iOS operating systems to use the same codebase to create apps that provide seamless performance. This, in turn, eliminates the need to build separate apps for both platforms.
Flutter for iOS developers was made available through Flutter 1.0, the framework’s first stable version, in 2018. Besides, Flutter’s app development toolkit offered a number of features that enabled smooth performance. In the subsequent year, Flutter for the web was released.
iOS App Development Using Flutter – Advantages
While many cross-platform development frameworks are available today, Google’s Flutter stands out because of the unique benefits it offers. The advantages of Flutter app development for the iOS platform are:
Fast-paced iOS app development
The Flutter framework takes the concept of rapid development to a new level. While most other cross-platform app development frameworks are dependent on traditional compilers for the purpose of reusing the code for different platforms, Flutter makes use of the Dart programming language’s dynamic scripting to ensure that the compiled languages perform optimally.
When compiling codes, the Dart programming language offers dynamic quality. In fact, Dart offers two different modes: compiled and interpreted. While the first mode helps compile an app’s code down to a device’s native OS code, the second mode enables a faster reloading experience. As such, Flutter, powered by Dart, helps increase the speed of iOS app development.
Perfect for the Development of Custom UIs
Flutter doesn’t work by acting as a wrapper and covering a platform’s native components when creating a user interface. Actually, Flutter can build UIs that can be rendered easily across multiple platforms. While the native UI components often tend to remain partial to one OS platform or the other in the case of React Native or Xamarin, the Flutter framework eliminates differences in UI rendering as well as implementation across platforms to a great extent. The UIs created by Flutter are rendered in an intended way across platforms. As such, Flutter is the best framework when it comes to ensuring the creation of UIs that work without any rendering issues.
Built-in Testing Capability
Another key advantage of creating iOS apps using Flutter is that the framework comes with built-in testing capability. Furthermore, the Dart language used by Flutter offers extensive support for unit and widget testing for business logic and UI-specific interactions, respectively. Besides, Flutter and Dart provide you with guides that help developers understand how the testing support mechanism works. When you are using Flutter, you don’t need any additional tools or plugins to cater to different testing requirements. You can perform all tests from UI interactions like gestures, scrolling actions, etc. to properties of widgets without any outside help.
Continuous Integration and Delivery
This concept of continuous integration and delivery is widely employed when it comes to iOS app development. Apple provides the Xcode server to enable continuous integration and delivery for all native iOS applications. However, many developers feel that the Xcode server does not have the scale-up operations, especially when implementing enterprise-level projects with the help of a large team of dedicated developers. This is when the use of the Flutter framework assumes importance.
Though Apple is experimenting with several technologies to enable optimum scalability through its servers, the company has not made much headway in ensuring scalability. On the other hand, Flutter’s tie-up with Nevercode a couple of years back offers a CI/CD solution. Named Codemagic, the new CI/CD solution enables the development, testing, and packaging of Flutter apps without the need to tweak their configuration.
Flutter Pros and Cons
Pros
Enables cross-platform app development
Ensures a truly native experience for apps
Offers widgets off the shelf
The Hot reload option allows code amendment on the go
Google's support is always available
Speeds up the app development process
Greater audience reach due to multiplatform support
Highly cost-effective
We need to maintain only single code instead of multiple codes for each platform. Hence maintenance is low and adding new features is easy.
Enables the creation of elegant UIs
Backed by Google and used by big organizations like Alibaba, Ebay.
Cons
Flutter is relatively new
The talent pool is smaller than native
We cannot make android auto apps
In conclusion, Flutter is the best option for building sophisticated, high-performance iOS apps. Flutter offers a versatile and robust framework for building cross-platform applications that offer a native experience to users.
Zartek Technologies
Zartek Technologies is a leading mobile app development agency in Toronto and specializes in the development of cross-platform apps using Flutter. As the top Flutter app development company in Canada, Zartek has the experience and expertise to build secure and flexible applications that best cater to the needs of clients. Our team of skilled app developers is also adept at creating iOS apps as part of our Flutter app development service.
