Flutter will change everything, and is an excellent choice for iOS development

That took me about 10 minutes, because:Flutter really shines when it comes to building layouts.So is Flutter on iOS pixel perfect?Well, you can make it so if you want.For me (and a lot of designers I talked to) design consistency across platforms is more important.Ultimately, I think a better question is: What matters most?And my personal answer is shipping high quality apps in a fraction of the time.Multi-platform workflowsFlutter Live made one thing clear: Flutter is positioning itself as the best tool for building UIs (and beyond) across all platforms.I have been using Flutter for nine months on a commercial project, and on many open source projects for my blog and video channel.And I believe Flutter is the holy-grail of front-end development.I had many pairing sessions with a UI designer who was always amazed at the increased speed of iteration..He even started making UI changes to the codebase himself.And I worked alongside a backend developer who was writing cloud functions for Firebase..Again, we would build things collaboratively, in realtime.Our testers were happy to find that the app would perform predictably and consistently on iOS and Android.This is expected with a product built from a single codebase.There were differences on some platform specific aspects (e.g. camera permissions), but these were the exception rather than the norm.What about Apple?Apple will continue to provide first-class support for their own platforms..That’s been their narrative all along.They will continue to improve iOS, and maybe even bring iOS and macOS closer together.They will enhance ARKit and CoreML to support their newest hardware..They need this in part to justify ever-increasing prices in their product line.But I can’t see them ever providing cross-vendor development tools..Which is what teams and businesses really want.Ironically, Apple may even stop supporting older devices sooner than Flutter does, since Flutter runs on iOS 8 and above.What about the Flutter jobs?People have asked me where are all the Flutter jobs.I think a lot of companies were waiting for version 1.0..And I have no doubt that the jobs will come.This is the most exciting time to become a Flutter early adopter.Compared to iOS or Android development, the learning curve is not so steep.Dart is an easy language to learn, and the tooling is great.The official documentation and training material from the community is amazing.Flutter is open source and the Flutter Team is very responsive in fixing things.Native iOS and Android development are here to stay..Flutter apps will continue interfacing to native APIs.But Flutter is far more productive than native APIs when it comes to pushing pixels around..And makes it possible to write business logic in a single codebase.This means that if you learn Flutter now, you will have a competitive advantage over developers and teams that stick with existing native workflows.In other words, I believe Flutter early adopters will have the upper hand in securing work and contracts, very soon.And I can promise you, Flutter is fun!So why not taking it for a ride?Happy coding!UPDATE: This article was originally called: “Flutter will change everything, and Apple won’t do anything about it”..This has caused some confusion..In the spirit of encouraging and welcoming iOS developers to try Flutter, I have renamed it.I published the source code for the example here on GitHub.And if you want to learn more about layouts in Flutter, here are my top two videos on YouTube:For more articles and video tutorials, check out Coding With Flutter.I’m @biz84 on Twitter..You can also see my GitHub page.. More details

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