Why Flutter Will Take Off in 2018

UPDATE: My Flutter course is now live! Check it out atfluttercrashcourse.com ?

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(No obnoxious TL;DR. If you’re in a rush, skip to my 5 points below.)

After developing for iOS for years then moving on to management, my passion in my free time is still writing backends and mobile apps. Apart from getting obsessed with Neo4j, then Golang many years ago, I haven’t been more excited since then about a new technology like Dart and Flutter.

What’s Flutter?

Flutter is a new mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android. [link]

So think React Native but with far better documentation, focused tooling that works very well, statically compiled, strongly typed code and without Javascript Fatigue. Flutter uses Google’s Dart language to offer engineers the best of React style component based UI design with a powerful, simple language (much like Go, but ridiculously easy to pick up like Ruby):

Dart is an application programming language that’s easy to learn, easy to scale, and deployable everywhere. [link]

I plan to blog on some of the iOS apps I am now re-writing using Flutter, rather than React Native. Note that I have used a bit of React Native in the past, and React for web apps extensively, I still think Flutter will take off in 2018. Here’s why:

Hybrid mobile frameworks like React Native are on the rise. Companies large and small are tired of spending large budgets on duplicate codebases and engineering teams across iOS and Android (unless there is a clear reason to to otherwise). I think Flutter will be a fantastic alternative to React Native once it comes out of alpha next year.
React Native’s documentation, like most Facebook documentation, is a mess and is more or less neglected. (Sadly, same goes for a lot of Facebook style documentation, but that’s another conversation.)
Native mobile engineers who are adding a hybrid mobile framework to their tool belt DON’T want to slide back to JavaScript. While moving from sluggish languages like Java or Objective-C to easier to use languages like Kotlin or Swift, engineers want a high quality dev experience. Switching back to JavaScript feels like a step backwards.
Dart, the language used to develop Flutter apps, is stupid-simple to learn. Google has experience in creating simple, well documented languages like Go, for example. So far, to me, Dart reminds me of Ruby and it’s a pleasure to learn. It’s also not only for mobile but for the web as well.
The tooling and documentation for Flutter is fantastic. Checkout the IntelliJ IDEA plugin. I use IntelliJ for Go development and it’s a great IDE. Regarding documentation, as you can see it’s quite well defined and easy to walk through.

I plan to re-write a few of my side projects (Steady Calendar, and Brewswap) that are iOS only now using Flutter next month. I’ve already started to learn Dart and create some test apps but to be honest, my gut is telling me this is going to be a well adopted framework in 2018.

UPDATE: My Flutter course is now live! Check it out atfluttercrashcourse.com ?

Source: https://codeburst.io/why-flutter-will-take-off-in-2018-bbd75f8741b0

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