Flutter
Flutter is an open-source software development kit created by Google. It is primarily used to develop cross platform applications from a single code base for Android and iOS. It also supports Linux, Mac, Windows, Fuchsia and the web.
At the launch in December 2018, at the Science Museum in London, I could already see that Flutter had a lot of potential and I became an early adopter. That potential was now a reality in the fast effective production of quality apps for Android and iOS. I have built or managed more than 30 apps to production on the App Store and Google Play now based on Flutter and developed by talented teams of professional developers.
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FlutterFlow
FlutterFlow is the real deal. I'd recommend looking at FlutterFlow. It exports Flutter source code that is neat, and editable, into your devops platform via GitHub. It is easy to use. It is quite possible to publish an app created entirely in FlutterFlow or for a product manager like me to create 'most' of an app and leave the hardest wiring up to a professional developer. You can read more about my work with FlutterFlow on this website.
Why Flutter?
I have been working on mobile applications for over twenty years: starting with the original Nokia Communicators (SyncML - remember that!); through the Symbian episode with Nokia Series 60; and Sony Ericsson with UIQ.
I product managed the first ever successful automated test tools for Symbian, Windows Mobile, Qualcomm Brew, and early Blackberry 10 devices. More recently, I have managed the development of apps for Apple iOS and Google Android. Consequently, I have always had an interest in cross-platform development tools.
There is no room in small budget projects, or in startups, for a gigantic development team full of language and platform zealots. Cross platform developers tend to have an enlightened viewpoint, coupled with experience of the broad collection of front and back-end development tools, as well as platforms and technologies required to bring an app to success. I prefer working like that.
The trouble is, cross platform has often meant compromise. Often one platform is considered superior to another, making it necessary to simplify your app to the lowest common denominator. Platform capabilities can be muted due to technical or pragmatic limitations in the cross platform toolchain.
Flutter is not perfect by any means and it is too is early to claim that in its development life-cycle. However, it is solving these cross-platform problems in an innovative way which has a lot of potential in the near term and a fabulous possible future relevance.
I have decided to use it in all current and future mobile projects. Last time I made such a bet was in 2012. So this, for me, is likely a ten year timeframe.
For clients, we have already built and released several Flutter based apps with tens of thousands of users. Porting that app to Dart and Flutter from JavaScript and an obscure cross platform framework at the end of its development life-cycle was a technical debt, that took several months, but now our new feature development is quicker and easier.
Using Flutter after using other tools to create mobile apps is like giving Blu-Ray Disk technology to someone with a VHS video recorder.
Note An earlier version of this article was originally published on my LinkedIn.
