The word Flutter is in buzz these days after its introduction by Google. Flutter is an open source free framework for both Android and IOS platforms. But with android you can unlock various other features by rooting your phone using SuperSu Zip. Apple and Android both have different tools, themes and languages for developing mobile apps. But with Google Flutter you can use same code for both platforms and you can say one code for two platforms. Isn’t it good news for organizations to increase their ROI.
Flutter is based on a new programming language called Dart which is developed by Google itself. It is not a big deal for those who have skills in JavaScript and Java. Google is using Flutter framework for its upcoming operating system named as Fuchsia OS. For Flutter you can use IntelliJ IDE. Let’s have a look at the few features of Flutter for Android.
- Widgets in Flutter
Widget is equivalent to the view in Android. As we know, view is responsible for each and everything which is visible on the screen like buttons, toolbars etc. Same as view, we have widget in Flutter. If we compare, both Android view and widget are not exactly same but with Flutter widget you can construct UI as you want.
And the other difference is, you can’t redraw view until you call “invalidate”. Where on the other end, widgets have different lifespan means you can change widget state thus, a new widget instance tree will be created by Flutter. These are lightweight as they are immutable. You can also animate the widget to given animation in the app.
- Layouts in Google Flutter
In Android, to lay the widget horizontally or vertically, we use linear layout. But in Flutter, it can be done by Row widget and Column widget. And, to perform the task of Relative Layout, in Flutter you can use the combination of Row, Column and Stack widgets. You can also mention rules for the widgets. ListView widget in Flutter performs the functioning of both the ScrollView and an Android ListView.
- Database and Local Storage in Flutter
For storing a small collection of key-value pairs the SharedPreferences API is used in Android. Whereas to access this feature in Flutter, there is a plugin called as Shared_Preferences plugin. It covers the functionality of both Shared Preferences and NSUserDefaults. And also, it has SQFlite plugin to store structured data.
- Notifications
You can also setup push notifications in Flutter using Firebase Messaging Plugin. Whereas in Android, the Firebase Cloud Messaging is used for getting the same result.
- Themes
Flutter has come up with different beautiful styles and themes to make the mobile app eye catchier. Instead of declaring themes in XML like in Android, you can simply declare themes in top level widget. You can add material specific feature in WidgetsApp. It covers all the widgets which are required for app implementing Material Design.
Wrapping up
Google Flutter has made the flutter app development process easy for the developers and is highly in trends today. It is a time saving and user friendly framework launched by Google. You can easily develop mobile app simultaneously for both platforms the Android and IOS with Flutter framework.