New frameworks and technologies began to emerge with the rising popularity of cross-mobile application development. The Xamarin platform is an open-source platform developed by Microsoft. Xamarin was our first choice in 2019. Flutter changed everything – we knew we couldn’t turn back. Here is some content that may help you gain a better understanding of how Flutter may help you in your work.
A quick overview of Flutter and Xamarin
Xamarin and Flutter are both cross-platform frameworks for developing mobile applications. This is Google’s native UI toolkit for creating beautiful mobile, web, and desktop applications from the same codebase. Announcing it at the Dart Developer Summit 2015 was the first step. A lot has changed in Xamarin since Flutter was first introduced. There are two main differences between the two: the languages used and how the interface is developed.
What led us to pick Xamarin in the first place?
Xamarin sounds promising to most developers based on its description and functionality. By using Xamarin, developers can share 90% of their applications across platforms. A single language can be used to write all the business logic for all platforms, ensuring native performance, look, and feel. This is just a theoretical discussion. However, our impressions of XAML in practice differ slightly.
Where does Xamarin go wrong?
As a result of working with Xamarin, we encountered the following two problems:
UI design If you’re adding simple UI elements, these controls work as expected. However, if you’re adding advanced functionality (for instance, gradients, animations, shadows, borders, etc.), you’ll need custom controls.
- Problems with the customer’s renderer
For Xamarin Forms, you must create a “custom renderer” if you want to get a specific appearance.
Benefits of Flutter
- The most popular cross-platform UI toolkit
It is easy to create engaging user interfaces with advanced animations using Flutter. Globally, there are many open-source packages developed by developers. Due to its Google origins, Flutter may be suitable for novice mobile developers as well.
- Shareable code
A major advantage of Flutter is that its code can be shared across many platforms. Client-optimized languages like Dart enable developers to create fast apps for any platform. Its powerful programming language enables multiplatform development to be as productive as possible. Flutter apps are powered by Dart’s language and runtime.
- Flutter’s power
Due to its direct integration into machine code, Flutter doesn’t suffer from any performance bugs caused by interpretation. Flutter does not use the platform widgets provided by the operating system. The app instead provides a collection of widgets, such as Material Design widgets and Cupertino widgets (styled after iOS).
- Widgets
The graphic layer of an app is largely made up of widgets. Views and visual controls are the most common widgets, but animations and gesture detection can also be accomplished with widgets. You should be aware of two terms: graphic layer and widget.
- Pub
During the development of your app, you should first consider packages and plugins that are recommended by Flutter Favorites. Flutter, AngularDart, and general Dart programs can be used with Pub, a package manager for the Dart programming language. There are more and more well-rated packages every day. The quality and suitability of this product are not guaranteed.
Final words
With Flutter, you can create applications with engaging, advanced views while maintaining the same performance as native ones. There are fewer costs involved in this process than in other cross-platform solutions, and the user interface looks the same across all platforms. There is a chance that we will find an open-source solution for any widget or functionality we don’t get at the start.