Flutter

Flutter is Google's open-source UI toolkit for building natively compiled applications across mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Unlike React Native, which maps to native UI components, Flutter uses its own rendering engine (Skia, and more recently Impeller) to draw every pixel on screen. This means Flutter apps look identical on every platform, down to the exact same animations, shadows, and text rendering. The language used is Dart, which Google developed specifically to optimize for UI development. For custom web application development, Flutter is a strong choice when visual consistency across platforms is paramount. A single Flutter codebase can produce iOS, Android, web, Windows, macOS, and Linux applications with pixel-perfect fidelity. The widget system is composable and powerful, and hot reload makes iteration extremely fast during development.

1 From Zero to Standard

Flutter began as an experimental project inside Google called "Sky," first demonstrated at the Dart Developer Summit in 2015. The project was led by Eric Seidel, a former WebKit contributor, who wanted to see if a mobile framework could consistently render at 120 frames per second. The team chose to build their own rendering engine rather than relying on platform UI components, a controversial decision at the time. Flutter's first stable release (1.0) shipped in December 2018 at the Flutter Live event. Flutter 2.0, released in March 2021, added stable web and desktop support. Google uses Flutter internally for Google Pay, Google Ads, and the Stadia controller app.

2 The Technical Edge

Flutter's rendering engine originally used Skia, the same 2D graphics library that powers Chrome and Android. But Google built a completely new rendering engine called Impeller specifically for Flutter, released as default on iOS in Flutter 3.10 and on Android in Flutter 3.16. The reason was that Skia uses runtime shader compilation, which caused occasional frame drops (called "shader jank") the first time certain visual effects were rendered. Impeller pre-compiles all shaders at build time, eliminating this category of performance issues entirely. This kind of investment, building a custom graphics engine for a UI framework, is almost unheard of in the open-source world.

Visit: flutter.dev