Why Flutter in 2021

Here are the reasons I think Flutter is just going to keep growing and why 2021 will be a great year!

It's fast

We have two main points here and that is:

Hot reload and Hot restart
The performance is on par with Native

Hot reload and restart

So most of you know about Hot reload and Hot restart, but just having those is a main factor of why it contributes to the speed of which we develop apps. To be able to make a small change, save and see the code reflect in the app right away is a major win.

Performance

The other one is the performance, now I won't be talking and bringing up statistics about it in this blog as that would be a whole post in of itself. But just doing a quick google search on this should show you how Flutter performance is on par with Native applications.

It's developer Friendly

We have three points here and that is

Hot reload and Hot restart (again)
Dart
Testing

Hot reload and hot restart (again)

Let's break this down... I think most already agree how Hot reload and Hot restarts contributes to this so I will skip that one. But the second one is Dart.

Dart

The Dart Programming language is on the rise thanks to Flutter and coming from other languages such as C# or Java, you will rather quickly feel at home. Dart is a very easy language to understand and start working with. To me it's still missing some nice to have features but Sound Null Safety is coming soon I won't be surpised that more features will come after that!

Testing

Now we have testing, which is arguably one of the strong points of Flutter. With the built in functionality to do unit, widget and integration testing there is no reason to say no to it. I have a video regarding testing in Flutter so if you are interested in that you can find that here.

Truly cross platform

1 codebase 6 platforms. Now I know that there are as of writing this only two platforms which are in the stable channel which are iOS and Android. Though I may add that Flutter for Android and iOS was already good in early Beta so it's just a matter of time.

I already have a video where I set up a project to build for all 6 platforms (Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, Linux, Web) which you can find here.

It's Fun

Now one of the reasons why I enjoy teaching Flutter so much and that is because it's actually fun to build things with it. You don't have to wait several minutes to see a result, the composition structure with widgets makes it really easy to understand and the list goes on.

I have talked to people coming from other frameworks and even native and I have not talked to a single one which did not enjoy working with Flutter!

Strong backbone

Now this one is an extra which I feel is just as important if not more important than the previous points, and that is the following.

Community
Backed by Google
Supported by Canonical
Pushing hard for other companies to adopt

Community

In Flutter we have the best community I have ever seen. I have both experienced this early on when I started with Flutter but also more and more as it has grown.

Backed by Google

And it doesn't stop there, some speculate that "backed by Google" is a bad thing. I happen to be one that does not think that. The reason is that Google has now a lot of software that is reliant on Flutter. Two major examples are Google Pay and Stadia. I have a hard time seeing Google dropping Flutter to rebuild those two apps again from scratch.

Canonical Support

Now one thing that recently happened as well and that is the support by Canonical and for those that don't know. They are the ones that build the Linux distribution Ubuntu. The support there will really help the Linux version of a Flutter application forward! You can read me about it on a official blog post

Other companies

Now last but not least we have the future companies, and there has been a large push to get Microsoft to support in the Flutter development and I think that this is great. Now personally I have a hard time seeing Microsoft helping as they have their own framework Xamarin, but only time will tell.