Cross-Platform Mobile Development at Outsourcify
At Outsourcify, we specialize in crafting high-quality, cross-platform mobile applications that deliver seamless experiences across various devices.
Our journey in cross-platform development began with React Native, a framework that allowed us to build native-like applications using JavaScript. Over several years, React Native enabled us to efficiently create apps that catered to both iOS and Android platforms from a single codebase, until our mobile development team decided to try Flutter and then gradually shifted the development of new apps to this technology.
Cross-Platform vs. Native Development
In mobile application development, choosing between native and cross-platform approaches is pivotal.
- Native Development: Involves creating separate applications for each operating system (OS), such as Android (Java, Kotlin) and iOS (Objective-C, Swift), using platform-specific languages and tools. While this approach ensures the most optimal performance possible and full access to device features, it is much more complicated as the technologies needed are very particular and thus require specialized mobile developers, and moreover it requires maintaining a distinct codebases for each OS, each OS needs its own team of developers, leading to increased development time and costs, and this implies the app for Android and iOS might look and behave differently.
- Cross-Platform Development: Utilizes a single codebase to deploy applications across multiple OS platforms. This method accelerates development, reduces costs, and ensures uniformity across platforms. It may encounter limitations in accessing certain native functionalities and can face performance challenges compared to native applications, but in our experience it’s very unlikely to be the case unless your app has very niche technical features.
Understanding Flutter’s Position in the Development Landscape
Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit (SDK) created by Google. Introduced in 2015 and officially released in May 2017, Flutter enables developers to build natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Unlike some frameworks that rely on platform-specific components, Flutter uses its own rendering engine to draw widgets, ensuring consistent behavior across platforms.
Flutter applications are primarily written in Dart, a programming language also developed by Google. Dart compiles to native machine code, allowing Flutter apps to achieve high performance comparable to native applications. While Rust is another modern programming language known for its performance and memory safety features, it serves different purposes and is not directly related to Flutter’s architecture or development process.
Transition to Flutter
As the landscape of mobile development evolved, we continually assessed emerging technologies to ensure we provide the best solutions for our clients. This commitment led us to Flutter, Google’s open-source UI software development kit. Flutter’s unique approach to UI rendering and its comprehensive set of pre-designed widgets offered several advantages that aligned with our goals:
- Consistent UI Across Platforms: Flutter’s rendering engine allows for uniform UI and business logic across platforms, reducing inconsistencies that can arise in cross-platform development.
- Enhanced Performance: By compiling directly to native ARM code, Flutter eliminates the performance overhead associated with JavaScript bridges, resulting in faster and more responsive applications.
- Rich Set of Widgets: Flutter provides an extensive library of customizable widgets that adhere to both Material Design and Cupertino standards, enabling us to create visually appealing and intuitive interfaces.
- Hot Reload Feature: The hot reload functionality accelerates the development process by allowing us to view changes in real-time without restarting the application, thereby enhancing productivity and collaboration.
Why Outsourcify Chooses Flutter
Our decision to adopt Flutter was driven by its ability to address some of the challenges we encountered with previous frameworks. Flutter’s architecture minimizes platform-specific code, reducing development time and maintenance efforts. Additionally, its growing community and robust documentation have empowered our developers to innovate and implement complex features with greater ease.
By integrating Flutter into our development toolkit, Outsourcify continues to deliver high-performance, scalable, and aesthetically pleasing mobile applications that meet the diverse needs of our clients.
