This blog was originally published on RavSam blog.
Flutter is becoming a rage these days. Developers around the world are exploring this technology that has the potential to change the world of application development. There are many cross-platform development frameworks in the market, but no one matches the essence of Flutter. In this article, we will project our future vision for the Flutter and why being a Flutter Developer would be financially rewarding.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is Google’s latest innovation for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. It is a UI toolkit with fast development, expressive and flexible UI, and native performance. It comes with an extremely useful feature called hot reloading which renders the UI on the device in seconds helping in decreasing the development time.
What skills are required to be a Flutter Developer?
To be a Flutter Developer, the first thing you need to learn is Dart. Dart is a programming language developed by Google. It is a beautiful language that supports Object-Oriented design patterns. It has borrowed some of the best features from other programming languages such as C++, Javascript, etc. If you are comfortable in any programming language, then you can easily understand Dart and start developing Flutter applications.
Once you are comfortable with Dart, the next step is to learn Flutter itself. Everything in Flutter is a Widget. It means that you can add any widgets into widgets and build widget trees, which are then rendered by the Flutter engine and painted on the screen. Once you get an idea of how to build the layouts using widgets, you will be surprised by how easy it is to build the applications using Flutter.
Why learning Flutter could pay you $1Mn per year?
Now comes the main question. What is so special about the Flutter is that it could be a job with a salary of $1Mn per year. The answer is hidden in the Flutter itself, Write once, Build for anywhere.
Let us take an example of a company that has a brilliant product used by millions of users around the world. Their product is available as a Web App, Android app, iOS app, Windows Desktop app, Linux Desktop app, macOS Desktop app as well. Currently, they have a Frontend Engineer who works on the Web App. In their mobile team, they have an Android developer, an iOS developer, and a tester who writes an automated test for both apps. Coming to their desktop application ecosystem, they have four more developers working in a collaborative environment. All are very talented in what they do but implementing a new feature is very tedious as it has to be implemented in each of the applications. Also as the product functionality is increasing after every release, the maintenance is becoming a little difficult. They pay a collective of $800k to the developers in their company, plus the overhead maintenance cost.
Now let us imagine what would happen if there was a technology using which you could write the code and tests only once, and then compile it into multiple builds for different environments. Instead of hiring multiple individuals, the company could get a Flutter developer on board who would be responsible to develop this cross-platform functionality. Since we have to write the code only once, we know exactly what to test as well.
What’s next
The Web and Desktop apps designed in Flutter are still not up to the mark but the Google team is making Flutter better with each release. The community-backed plugin ecosystem is a huge advantage as it provides the developers with a way to add functionality to their app which is not provided by the Flutter itself. If you are a student, then definitely you should learn the Flutter. You can also become Google Developer Expert. Once you are done with flutter, you can upskill yourself by learning the backend development or Firebase. In this way, you could be the next Full Stack Developer with Flutter as a speciality.
Thanks for reading 💜
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