Google today released its mobile UI framework for building cross-platform applications as a beta. The open-source project, Flutter, lets developers build native cross-platform apps for Android and iOS in Dart.

Flutter is a lot like Facebook’s cross-platform React Native project: it’s designed to make it easy for developers to build cross-platform apps with a shared code base. Like React Native, Flutter lets developers build applications with platform-specific features and access core hardware features on Android and iOS. Flutter also includes one of React Native’s most popular features: Hot Reload, making it dead easy for developers to work on their app without needing to re-compile it every time they make a tiny tweak. Developers can build Flutter applications with Dart 1, but it also works with the pre-release of Dart 2.

Flutter is an open-source technology, so it already has a package library. Google says there are already more than 1000 third-party modules for Flutter that developers can use right away with their apps, including things like Firebase, and GraphQL. React Native obviously had a huge head-start, and its collection of third-party packages is significantly bigger. In addition to the third-party packages, Flutter comes pre-packed with some built-in widgets/components that will further speed up the development of apps which is pretty neat.

The first beta of Flutter is available here right now, and interested developers can also contribute to the development of the project on GitHub here.

Tagged with Flutter, Google, React Native, SDK