Flutter is the leading UI development toolkit for cross-platform mobile apps. Businesses are willing to create engaging native UI and UX without programming. With multiple platform-specific technologies find Flutter as the best development framework.
Created and maintained by Google, Flutter has now become the most loved technology with a robust modular architecture. A wide variety of tools for building apps across iOS, Android, web, and desktop platforms. Since it allows reusing the same code for web, mobile, and desktop. Both mobile and web application development companies find Flutter a great tool for shaping the versatile digital presence of their business clients.
But Flutter development has its own set of challenges as well. When you hire a Flutter developer for your cross-platform app project, a solid understanding of these challenges is absolutely necessary. Here throughout this blog post, we are going to explain some of the less-talked-about challenges of building apps with Flutter.
The Dart challenge
Flutter uses Dart programming language which brings a paradigm shift in the otherwise JavaScript-dominated frontend development world. Dart is a new language that Google primarily created for internal uses and later unleashed with the Flutter framework.
Dart offers several key positive attributes starting from clean and low-footprint coding to easily readable syntax to ease of debugging. But at the same time, for most developers, Dart brings a steep learning curve that ultimately can result in slower development for many Flutter-based projects. Despite the overwhelming popularity of Flutter, the learning curve of Dart worked as a deterrent for many developers.
JavaScript is so widespread and common that it became a basic language for any developer to start his developer career. Naturally, the vast majority of JavaScript-skilled developers cannot readily embrace Flutter because of the Dart programming challenge. At least a basic knowledge of Dart programming is necessary to master Flutter development.
A shift from typical UI building experience
The way Flutter approaches developing user interfaces is completely different from that of JavaScript frameworks like React Native. Instead of relying on the JavaScript bridge to connect the native UI layers of iOS and Android. Flutter rather develops the entire native UI within the IDE by using widgets.
The Flutter development teams need to get versed with specific Widget uses customization settings. It also needs editing rules and practices, modes, controller management, and widget-based storyboards. Managing all these things within the context of platform-specific widgets is a bit too complicated and demanding.
Performance shortcomings
Many developers are of the opinion that Flutter perfectly fits into simple app projects. It literally does not cause any performance bottlenecks for apps with just one or two basic features. But in the case of complex and multilayered apps with a load of features. Flutter can significantly drop the loading speed and app performance to a great extent.
As it has been experienced by many Flutter developers, every additional menu and integration of native API can significantly pull down the speed and performance of the app to a great extent. The core team behind Google, the worldwide developer community may already be working to make Flutter speedier. But the ultimate performance boost may still take some time to take effect.
No option for saving an instance for troubleshooting
When a Flutter app slows down in performance, Flutter like many other frameworks and libraries fail to preserve the problematic instances for future references. Because of this, developers need to rewrite the entire instance from the beginning leading to a lot of unnecessary resource and time consumption and an unsatisfactory troubleshooting experience.
When the same problem occurs in the case of complex apps, the developers may need to rewrite a lot of instances which is literally impossible. This is the reason why most Flutter apps come with just a single screen and cannot accommodate multilayered activities.
Lack of support for longer development session
Flutter developers often experience this issue when programming with Dart. For long-term programming activities, Dart doesn’t allow pressing the back button or temporarily inactive sessions. Just by switching to another app, developers can see their activities are blocked by Flutter. This becomes really problematic fir the complex app projects requiring longer execution time.
With Flutter, just after closing an app developers need to restart everything. Any app project that involves a lot of continuous activities for a longer development time, finds this really erratic and unsatisfactory.
Too frequent crashes
Another important demerit of Flutter is that apps built with this technology crash too frequently. Particularly feature-rich and complex apps built with Flutter have a tendency to crash all of a sudden in several instances. Issues of non-responsive app UI are also frequently reported by Flutter developer teams.
With Flutter projects, these performance issues particularly occur when the app needs to integrate a native API for interactive and resource-consuming features. For example, there are reports of issues from Flutter teams regarding GPS map integration.
Every Flutter widget needs customization
We all know that the Flutter framework basically achieves a lucid and visually appealing UI through a large number of widgets representing every UI element such as buttons, menu bar, etc. Problem is, that there is hardly any widget that can be used readily without customization.
So, widgets appearing to be useful building blocks for Flutter app projects, actually consume a lot of effort from developers. As a repository, the widgets can just provide you with something to build upon, but these widgets are far from ready-to-use UI building components in a Flutter app project.
Summing It Up
Flutter takes the versatile concept of “build once & run everywhere” to the next level by addressing platform-specific UI requirements and by extending to web and desktop beyond mobile operating systems. Despite these awesome Flutter advantages, the framework has its own shortcomings as well. As a Flutter developer, discovering turnaround measures for these challenges is crucial for the project outcome.
