Should I learn Flutter in 2021?
If you have been asking this question to yourself, then let me tell you that you are in the right place, and the short answer is yes! But to know why the answer is yes, read on.
Flutter has earned a great deal of fame this year. A lot of developers are switching to Flutter, so this issue is fair enough to surface in your mind. But don’t worry, I’m here to make things a bit simpler for you.
What is Flutter?
Let’s introduce Flutter briefly before we move on to the reasons why you should learn Flutter. It is an open-source cross-platform app development kit developed by Google, back in May 2017. By cross-platform, we mean that you can develop apps for iOS, Android, Web, Desktop.
Although only iOS and Android are in stable version and web is in beta whereas desktop is in alpha. But like almost everything else in the world, things take time to develop. And it will not be long till we can develop production-ready apps for all these platforms.
There are mainly two aspects of Flutter:
- Flutter is a Software Development Kit, a collection of tools used in software development all accessible through one installable bundle.
- Flutter is a Widget Library, a set of reusable UI components like buttons, slider, container, rows, columns, text input, etc.
Flutter uses Dart to build apps, and Dart is super easy to learn if you are already familiar with languages like Java, JavaScript, and C#. But don’t panic, you can still learn Flutter even if you don’t know any of these.
Reasons you should learn Flutter
In the coming year, markets are going to be frugal, therefore cross-platform app development will definitely face a boom. I’ll give you five reasons why you should learn Flutter in 2021. Let’s address them in detail.
Faster development
Flutter supports a fast app development process hence it saves a lot of time that goes into getting your application from start to finish. Flutter has a rich widget library out of the box which speeds up and simplifies the process of creating UI/UX.
One other feature of Flutter is it supports stateful hot reload and hot restart which saves the time that goes into reloading the application on minor changes. Since Flutter has a single codebase, it becomes easier to add modifications and fix bugs.
Easier to learn
Flutter uses Dart as its programming language, which is quite easy to learn. And no matter what your background is, be it android or web, Flutter encourages you to bring your prior knowledge and apply it here. Check out this link for more information:
https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/flutter-for/android-devs
And even if you’re a beginner starting with Flutter as your very first technology. Don’t worry, there are plenty of video as well as written tutorials using which you can learn to create your first app.
Trends
The Flutter repository on Github has over 110,000 starts and is one of the fastest-growing open-source community on Github. Flutter is chosen by 39% of developers as the choice of cross-platform app development, this number was 30% in 2019. (image src: https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-software-developer-working-hou
Although Flutter was launched in 2018, whereas React native is relatively older, launched in 2015. However, Flutter is catching up to React native pretty quickly.
All these factors on their own may not determine much about Flutter but if we look at them as a whole, it’s safe to say that Flutter will be the next big thing in mobile development.
Increase in demand for flutter devs
As we can see in the trends, more and more developers as well as companies are moving towards Flutter. Because of this shift, there will be an increase in Flutter jobs as employers will need to hire experienced Flutter developers. So, starting your Flutter journey at this point will prove beneficial to you as you’ll be ahead in the game.
New updates
The Flutter team has announced a Flutter event which will be held on 3rd March 2021. And we can say that there are going to be some announcements which will contribute to the further growth of Flutter.
Some assumptions we can make about the updates are:
- Flutter web may go into stable and desktop may go into beta
- Updates on devtools
- Null safety is in beta, it may move to production so that the apps can be migrated to null safety
- New good state management approach
And even if these aren’t the exact updates to be given by the Flutter team, there will still be some updates which means Google, as well as the community, is trying for Flutter to get into a much better state than it is now.
With all the given reasons, I’m sure you are convinced and want to learn more about Flutter. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
