Flutter & Firebase – Panacea for Mobile Applications ?

Looks, we are now settled with only two platforms for Mobile applications, iPhone and Android. However, they are still two separate beasts with their own challenges, taming them requires desperate skills and knowledge base.

There have been options like React Native to have a single codebase for developing applications that generate native code to target both platforms with nuances.

Google, the God Father, came out with a toolkit for creating native experiences for iOS and Android from a single codebase.

Major differentiator with its close competitor, React Native, is it does not use native UI components for rendering UI. This prevents it from falling in a trap of least common differentiator.

It’s based on a different model, where its own engine is used for creating Widgets on device. I am not including the finer details here, but is a promising alternative.

Though I have been observing it for some time since its alpha, beta incarnations, but now a stable Version 1.0 is available.

But a potential question is its access to native features of platform, it excels here with its extension mechanism of “Package & Plugins” which make this integration (very) simple. Same is true for Material Design for Android and Cupertino for iPhone.

It uses a simple language Dart for creating flutter applications.

I played with it on my Mac, it was fun and wiz to see same codebase working smoothly on both iPhone and Android.

Smell same fragrances when I first saw Java as a solution to multiple platform glitches two decades back.

This does not complete story, providing backend to a mobile platform is still an issue.

Typical Mobile Only is rarely a solution, a backend server is invariably required to store backend data and Communication amongst all the users of same application is a challenge too. Setting up servers, providing APIs requires efforts and resources.

Google again comes to rescue here with its Firebase suit of services with Plugs-in with Flutter seamlessly.

The statement “Firebase helps mobile app teams succeed” is genuine, it helps building applications fast, without managing infrastructure.

Services like Cloud Firestore, Authentication, ML Kit, Storage is big plus for mobiles.

Will write in detail about them later.

But a combination of Flutter and Firebase is Big Plus for those in Mobile Solutions. Worth exploring them

Here are the two URLs for further details,

https://flutter.io/

https://firebase.google.com/

Wishing you Happy Explorations, please feel free to contact me for any help.