Work in Flutter, a framework designed from the ground up for dual platform development, with support for native Java/Kotlin or Objective-C/Swift methods from Flutter apps. Write your next app in one language and build it for both Android and iOS.

Deliver the native look, feel, and performance you and your users expect from an app written with each platform's own tools and languages.

Deliver apps fast, doing half the work you were doing before and exploiting powerful new features to speed up development. Write once, run anywhere.

Why Flutter Matters and What We’ll See in This Book

Flutter’s entry into the mobile app development framework space is recent and, because of that, Flutter needs to carry significant improvements over existing frameworks and SDKs to actually be useful—and it does.

For one thing, with Flutter you’ll be able to develop apps that work with Android, iOS, and Google Fuchsia, (which might replace Android and/or Chrome OS at some point in the future). Flutter is developed by Google, but it fully supports iOS, and this means you can now also run an iOS emulator and build for iOS in Android Studio. However, you won’t be able to build iOS apps on Linux or Windows because iOS emulation and compilation is still done through Xcode.

Flutter makes developing apps incredibly easy by allowing you to define the app’s UI declaratively but in the same place and language you define the app logic (no XML UI files required). You can instantly preview the changes you make to your app using stateful hot reload.

Additionally, its cross-platform nature doesn’t skimp on having a native look and feel, as the framework supports all of the typical native features of each of the operating systems (different app bar, different list drag to update, Material Design and Apple icons, etc.).

The advantages compared to other cross-platform frameworks don’t end there: you’ll be able to run any native Kotlin/Java and Swift/Objective-C method using platform channels, as we’ll see in ​Integrating Native Code: Making Plugin Packages​.

Even though it’s really new, Flutter is already used by some big and established companies (as well as many smaller ones) to build cross-platform mobile apps, as you can see in Google’s Flutter Showcase Page.

We’ll be using Flutter packages and plugins (many of them developed by Google) to build ever more useful apps, also introducing more advanced standard Flutter features such as navigation and animations.

Don’t Know Dart? Don’t Worry About It

You might want to read Appendix 1, ​ Introduction to Dart if you don’t have much programming experience or find even the first chapter difficult to follow because of Dart’s syntax; many Dart-specific constructs will be explained during the course of the book, but you might want to consider going through that appendix first if you find yourself struggling to understand the code.

About the Author

Carmine Zaccagnino is a web and mobile developer and has struggled for years building Android apps using the standard SDK and, in a lesser way, Web-based tools. His experience in development areas other than mobile development has led him to be particularly bothered by the lack of a native (or close to native) framework that can bridge together Android and iOS without losing low-level access to hardware and software, until Flutter did exactly what was needed.