In modern mobile development, choosing the right framework can significantly impact efficiency, performance, and scalability. In this article, Agustín Méndez Fillipini, a developer at Sagant, shares his insights on Flutter—a framework that has gained traction for its cross-platform capabilities, native rendering performance, and accessible learning curve. Through a technical and experience-based perspective, we explore its advantages, limitations, and key considerations for adopting Flutter in real-world projects.

Having tools that allow you to create high-performance applications efficiently is key. Flutter has gained popularity for its ability to develop cross-platform applications with a single code base. In this article, we will talk about what Flutter is, its main advantages, and my experience using it.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is an open-source framework developed by Google, used to create cross-platform applications for Android, iOS, Mac, Linux, Windows, and the web, but mainly used for mobile development. Inspired by React, Flutter offers tools and widgets to create visually appealing, high-performance applications, in addition to its ease of development. These points make Flutter an increasingly popular choice among developers.

Advantages of Flutter

• Multiplatform

One of the great advantages of Flutter is that it shares a single code base for all platforms, using Dart as its programming language. This facilitates development and greatly reduces work time.

• Hot reload

Among Flutter’s most notable features is hot reload, which means that we can make changes to our code and see them instantly in the application, making the development process much more agile and straightforward.

• Easy UI/UX design

Another notable feature of Flutter is that it has a wide collection of fully customizable widgets, which make it easy to create visually appealing applications, as well as animations to make transitions smoother. In addition, the design is unique for all platforms, resulting in a unified application, unlike other frameworks that have specific widgets for each one.

• Low learning curve

The Dart programming language has a low learning curve, especially if you have already worked with object-oriented languages such as Java and JavaScript, among others.

• Compilation to native code

Flutter compiles native code for each platform, which means faster loading times and high performance.

Other factors to consider

• Integration with other frameworks

As it is a fairly new framework, it does not have as large a community as others, which means that there are fewer libraries and resources available. This means that it will be more difficult to create specific solutions that require integration with other frameworks or technologies. However, in the long term, this should not be a problem, as the Flutter community continues to grow.

• Unit testing

For unit testing, Flutter uses the “test” and “flutter_test” libraries. The way to do unit testing is quite similar to the React framework, so if you are already familiar with this technology, it will be much easier.

• Application size

One of the disadvantages of Flutter is that applications tend to take up more space compared to native apps. This is because it includes the rendering engine within the app package. Although strategies can be applied to reduce the size, it is still an aspect to consider if the weight of the app is a critical factor.