Flutter is an open-source dev kit developed by Google, and it is used by developers around the globe for developing hybrid apps, i.e. apps for Android, Apple, Windows, and web. Alpha version of Flutter was released in May 2017, and the stable version of Flutter was released on December 4, 2018.
Flutter apps are developed using Google’s Dart programming language. Flutter has four major components in its development. (1) Dart platform. (2) Design specific widgets. (4) Flutter engine. (5) Foundation library.
Due to the hybrid development nature of the Flutter the amount of its developers is increasing day by day, and now as per the latest statistics released from Google nearly 2 million developers have used Flutter since version 1.0 that was released in Dec 2018 and nearly half a million developers are using Flutter each month. Currently, there are almost 50000 apps published at Google Play developed by Flutter developers and only 10000 apps were uploaded in the last month.
Google has also revealed some statistics and nature of the use of Flutter by different ecosystems, one of the top five regions where Flutter developers are based are India, China, the US, the EU, and Brazil. Out of all users, 7 % are working in companies, 19% are self-employed freelancers, 26% are developers in large companies and 35% of users are in small startups. Most of the developers are building apps on Windows OS. 60% of Flutter users are developing on Windows 10 OS, 27% on Apple OS, and 13% are building on Linux OS.
Like other frameworks, Flutters has also competitors in the tech market and the main is React Native which is developed by Facebook. It is also well known due to its nature of hybrid development. In hybrid development, you have to write code once for a single framework and it will run on all platforms albeit with some minor changes. Developers are able to write code for mobile apps, desktop apps, wearables, and web.
Flutter is also using some popular framework packages in apps that are http, intl meta, path_provider, pedantic, and shared_preferences. Some popular third-party packages used in Flutter apps are provider, cached_network_image, font_awesome_flutter, flutter_launcher_icons, rxdart, and sqlite.
Flutter still has some issues and Google is trying to fix them, Google is trying to optimize the testing and quality of Flutter branches and also working on the release and stability process of Flutter, so developers can better understand about the upcoming release of Flutter.
Tim Sneath Group Product Manager for Flutter and Dart has said, “We will now branch at the beginning of the month for a beta release and stabilize this release by cherry-picking any critical fixes. Roughly once a quarter, the current beta branch will be promoted to our stable release. We will continue to do hotfixes on this release if necessary.”
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