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Discussion on: I am Android Developer with Java and Kotlin, Ask Me Anything!

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Omkar Ajnadkar

Hey Ankit, What is your opinion about Flutter? Is it better to start using it than Android?

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Ankit Kumar

Flutter is a hot topic among the developers. It’s a new mobile app SDK that helps developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android (at least according to the official website).
It is an open source project developed mainly by a group of engineers at Google. But it also has external contributors (there were about 130 of them at the time of writing this post). It’s written in Dart language which is also maintained by Google. Of course, I would prefer Kotlin but when Flutter’s development started, Kotlin was not so popular as it is today so Dart seems like a reasonable choice. Having Flutter and Dart in control allowed for creating an awesome tooling and IDE integration. It works seamlessly with IntelliJ and Android Studio.

Something I noticed are

  • Flutter doesn’t support OpenGL yet, so there is no MapView or VideoView.
  • I found out that Flutter can be used as a View on Android and UIView on iOS.
  • No accessibility support.
  • I have great news for you: Flutter supports testing and it’s awesome! You can even write unit tests for UI!

Overall its good to start app development with Flutter.