Is it a good idea to use flutter if I'm doing android development only?

Question

I don't know if this is the right place to ask this kind of question, but I'm going to ask my question anyway.

Recently, I finished building my first android app. Nothing fancy, just a simple app with a single activity, a recyclerView and toolbar. I noticed that during the app development, instead of focusing on creating the app's functionalities, I found my self spending most of the time struggling with googling and repetitive app building while trying to build the UI and customizing it the way I want.

Now I want to try to make another app but I don't want to go through the same painful process again. This is where flutter come into play. Flutter is a good framework for UI building and customization and with hot-reload it's perfect. So I was thinking, instead of going 100% android, why not try a hybrid approach: use flutter for UI, and flutter's platform channels for API access.

What do you think guys. Is it a good idea or should I just stick with kotlin for android apps only? Thanks

Answer 1

Now I want to try to make another app but I don't want to go through the same painful process again. This is where flutter come into play. Flutter is a good framework for UI building and customization and with hot-reload it's perfect. So I was thinking, instead of going 100% android, why not try a hybrid approach: use flutter for UI, and flutter's platform channels for API access.

You'll will sometimes had to go through a painful process when trying to learning a new thing. (Sometimes) No pain no gain. Pain is not an excuse to leave your previous endeavour.

Flutter is good for lowering the barrier on creating an app that support both Android and iOS but it didn't make you mastering both the Android and iOS application ecosystem. It's because Flutter is a kind of an abstraction layer for both OS so it hide you the implementation for them. So, you need to keep learning on creating Android and iOS native application to grasp all the capabilities of both of them.

For everything beside directly accessing device capabilities (sensor, camera, etc), you can use Flutter. It's a good choice for it.

What do you think guys. Is it a good idea or should I just stick with kotlin for android apps only? Thanks

You need to learn Flutter, Java, kotlin for the front-end. And try to learn php, golang or other languages for the back-end. Because both of front-end and back-end will be needed for your next Android project.

Answer 2

It sounds like you have given this a lot of thought and your thought process seems pretty sound. The only thing I would worry about is the learning curve of Dart and Flutter if you don't already know it. Also, there are a lot of UI Component libraries out there that you should check out to see if it solves your UI woes before you commit to Flutter. Whatever you choose, Good luck on your project