Flutter: cross-platform development made easy
Created by Google, Flutter is a cross-platform open-source SDK to build apps for iOS & Android. With its expressive UI, fast development and native performance, Flutter should be music to your ears. For us, being a mobile agency, our goal is to make sure our clients receive an app that works consistently across many devices from different manufacturers...
Get to know our Flutter expert: Koen Van Looveren
When I started working at icapps in September 2017, I did a lot of research of Flutter in my spare time. I introduced Flutter at icapps in January 2019. That's when I took the lead in an innovation track and a whole bunch of research, proof of concepts, and meetups to get to know other enthusiasts. As we realized some crucial tools were missing and some existing tools were insufficient, we created new tools, made contributions to existing packages, took over a popular dependency injection library, and created a template project. I truly believe that Flutter is the best alternative to Native development with simular performance results with the advantage of a single code base.
Putting Flutter to the test
Flutter Engage; our predictions and desires
Flutter announced their next keynote Flutter Engage to take place on Wednesday 3/03/2021, and we couldn’t be more excited to find out what the new release will bring us. Normally Flutter has a release every 3 months, but since the last release was already 5 months ago, we’re hoping for a big surprise this time! Will 3/3/2021 be a symbolic date? Maybe they will release a 3rd stable platform, web? Alongside the existing other 2: iOS and Android? We’re speculating the hell out of this one. But let’s hear what our Flutter expert, Koen Van Looveren, predicts, or can we say; hopes for:
Flutter, not your ordinary cross-platform framework
We were very excited to dive into one of Google's latest technologies: Flutter. Flutter is a technology to build beautiful native apps on iOS and Android from a single codebase. Fast development, expressive UI and Native Performance... all sounding very promising! To put Flutter to the test, we made a proof of concept together with KBC Bolero. In this blogpost we would like to share our findings.
Comparing 3 cross-platform technologies: Native, React Native and Flutter
Since cross-platform technologies are hot and happening these days, we did a little research about the ones we are using at the moment. We compared three cross-platform technologies, Native Shared Library, React Native, and Flutter to have a look at their strengths, weaknesses, and overall performance. Since we used them for various projects, we can speak from our own experience. A very useful exercise, and we gladly share the main findings with you.
Starting a new Flutter project with our template
At icapps we have a couple of template projects to make sure we can start a new project without having to do the setup again every time. One of them is the Flutter template, built by Koen Van Looveren (Lead Flutter at icapps).