“2022 Update – This is a check on Flutter for Hybrid Applications!”

With Flutter, hybrid developers only need to scribble their code once. This single code works around one platform but can be tweaked a bit to make applications across another platform work.

How does Flutter work?

Flutter is based on a foundation library, widgets, and Flutter engine. It makes use of declarative UI authoring and utilizes a collection of widgets to design the complete user interface. Flutter provides multiple software packages and enables access to Firebase and Redux data warehouses to improve the user experience.

More Applications and Benefits of Flutter

Flutter Secure Storage package uses Keystore for Android and Keychains for iOS, both of which are considered standard in terms of securing sensitive data to your users’ mobile devices.

Flutter with Firebase helps applications maintain different users and authenticate them. To accomplish this, developers create a Firebase account, add a project with the desired project name, and follow the SDK instructions provided by Firebase to connect the Flutter Project with Firebase.

Flutter is relatively easy to install, and use. It comes with easily customizable, and established user interface components to choose from, a shorter turnaround time for screen development, is functional, is aesthetic, and has a short developer run cycle.

Google Analytics SDK – Flutter Fire acts as an inbuilt app measurement solution to log events, set user properties, debug events, track screen views, measure eCommerce, measure ad revenue, extend with cloud functions, error codes, reference API, configure data collection and usage

Flutter Secure Storage package uses Keystore for Android and Keychains for iOS to secure sensitive data to your users’ mobile devices.

Google Flutter Team releases frequent security fixes and patches to secure the apps. Flutter SDK plugins and packages are the safest ways to secure the flutter app.

Rename obfuscation hides vulnerable strings, methods, class names and API keys to form compiled binaries, that look much less complicated.

DART programming language handles platform-specific obfuscation for native code.

The Proguard configuration file obfuscates the code and shrinks the size of Android Apps.

In the iOS app, the compiler strips the symbols and applies optimizations to the code, making it difficult for attacks.

Restricted API access to API keys secures it from potential attacks. Application restriction controls which websites, IP addresses, or applications can use your API key. You can set one application restriction per key (None, HTTP referrers (web sites), IP addresses (web servers, cron jobs, etc.), Android apps, iOS Apps). Besides server-side restrictions, Flutter apps can be secured by moving the integrations to the backend and exposing the methods via RESTful APIs.

Also encrypting and decrypting API keys on runtime adds an extra layer of protection.

API keys of Flutter open source projects should not be tracked on the repository. Instead, enforce the use of environment configuration files.

Firebase Remote Config should not be used to store sensitive data as you make changes without publishing the build.

A whistling domain is a trusted way to restrict network traffic/congestion to an unsecured endpoint. Other ways to safeguard Flutter apps from hackers are certificate pinning, restricting dubious permission requests, caching integrating local authentication, securing developer identity, securing CI infrastructure, and enforcing strict access control (good to have).

What does Flutter offer?

• It can be optimized to create minimum viable products for mobile devices.
• It offers high-level widgets and an adaptable user interface.
• It provides plugins for advanced operating systems with simple logic.
• To build layouts
• To add interactivity
• To add animations
• To internationalize the Flutter app

Conclusion: What do we learn?

Cross-platform app development companies use Flutter to build beautiful user interfaces. It speeds up the app development process and reduces project costs as the same code can be used on multiple platforms.

Big brands like Airbnb, Uber, Alibaba, Baidu, Betterment, Bytedance, GooglePay, CrowdSource, Groupon, Kotak, iRobot, Philips Hue, Realtor.com, Hamilton, and Square are using Flutter for cross-platform app development in e-commerce, retail, banks, FinTech, large businesses, and enterprises.

Flutter applications are less complex and act as a productive prototyping tool. It speeds feature development and synchronizes release schedules across the entire customer base. Flutter delivers branded designs, and supports a variety of hardware (camera, GPS, storage, network) and services (payments, cloud storage, ads, and authentication).

The post Why is Flutter preferable for Cross-Platform Mobile App Development? appeared first on Top ITFirms - Result of In-depth Research & Analysis.

React Native- an open-source cross-platform development framework

Recently, major tech companies and enterprises gravitated towards more apps than average, more of which are hybrid apps as they are rendering a frictionless development experience to developers and end-users.  Because we have got some excellent and superior frameworks designed to create cross-platform apps that look and feel like native. The app’s ability to function across multiple platforms is the urgent need for all startups, business groups and brands.

Facebook’s React Native is one such boon to the industry. When other cross-platform projects failed, React Native succeeded and it has been accepted by 70% of the app owners to build their business apps, leveraging the potentials benefits of this framework. With React Native, the code reusability is 85%. Who doesn’t want to get an optimized, reasonable solution like this?

Topping the charts, React Native app development has also impressed Microsoft experts as in the recent announcement, they revealed that “Microsoft will port React Native to run on Windows 10, Windows phone and Xbox one.”

Cross-platform application development has made considerable growth in the last five years. There was this time when business owners had to unwillingly agree to cross-platform apps because of the budget restrictions and not-so-expert team of mobile app developers. Despite a lot of criticism and cynicism, experts in the industry didn’t lose hope and finally, have emerged with incredibly productive and efficient frameworks to cater to hybrid app development.

React Native is the invention by Facebook and is currently used by major mobile app brands including Instagram, Airbnb, Baidu, F8, WalmartLabs, , Bloomberg. React Native has inherited the user familiarity from Facebook UI, that gives an added advantage of being accepted as a cross-platform app, reducing the need for a native UI. The way tech team is working towards improving and advancing React Native, the day is not far when it will allow 100% code reusability.

Why React Native?

One thing that’s influential about React Native is that it doesn’t build a mobile web app, neither an HTML5 app nor a hybrid app, not any average product that’s a result of Objective-C or Java programming but a distinguishable, real-world mobile app that stands out for all theknown benefits that React Native offers.

No extra recompiling time

React Native provides the option of hot reloading, whichbuilds your app faster and completely removes the need of app recompilation.

Optimize app with native code

If anytime, the developer or app owner feels like dropping down to native code to optimize few components of the application, React Native smoothly combines with components written in Objective-C, Swift and Java.  Like the Facebook app, half of your app can be built on React Native and the rest in pure native code. This gives developers the liberty to choose wisely what part of the app can be built on React Native and what in pure native such that the app works excellently without any glitch.

Together with the obvious benefits of reduced development time and reduced costs that a cross-platform app development framework offers, there are some major, unrevealed developments this open-source framework has brought to the mobile app development as whole. You, as an app owner or a mobile app developer, must cognize to deliver the best user experience in limited budget and minimum time, through an app that works perfectly across all mobile platforms.

Let’s see why and how some of the top Fortune 500 companies have made the most out of React Native app development.

F8 (Facebook business app), which was earlier built on Parse, has now shifted to React Native because of the choice of Data Layer that React Native allows. It doesn’t need to be tightly connected to a data layer. This results in development of UI and app logic in a React Native app with mock data. So, the data source of the completely developed app can be swapped with minimal adjustments, provided the structure of data remains the same.

Instagram has come a long way using the latest React Native app development. The app has explored more using React Native so as to ship features faster via code sharing and iteration speeds. Instagram has wisely used tools like Hot Reloading and Live Reload offered by React Native, thereby eliminating complete-install cycles.

At WalmartLabs, the team most sensible to use React Native before any other cross-platform framework because it’s fairly stable and likely to remain popular for a while. Further, the various benefits Walmart observed with React Native are:

• 95% of code is shared between their Android and iOS apps. Even the team shared the front-end/presentation code between the platforms.
• Developers had an awesome experience as they didn’t need to restart packager to see the simple changes
• As React Native is in JavaScript, it was easy for Walmart to get the right, skilled resources.

Since the code is converted to native views before rendering, React Native offers immensely smooth animations. And this was a great advantage for the Walmart team as their app needed those aesthetics.

Further, one big advantage of React Native app development that made the Walmart team realize they had taken the best decision to include this framework for cross-platform app development is the ability to push bug fixes over-the-air, sidestepping the app stores. Henceforth, the JS bundle is hosted by the server and can be directly received by the client, just like the web application.

All benefits considered, React Native has some implausible features that no other open-source cross-platform app development framework has ever offered. Speaking of which, 90% of code reusability is the biggest selling point for app owners as they need nothing but a pixel perfect app working seamlessly across platforms with just one codebase, built in minimum time and reasonable investment. An icing on the cake, the applications built using React Native these days are performing better than those coded purely native.

We strongly recommend React Native cross-platform development framework for your next project. It has everything that a developer needs to create a fantastic app project on iOS and Android together. For rest of the technical assistance, from project management to deployment, you can leave it on us. Our React Native app developers will craft a top-quality mobile app, converting your simplest idea into a delightful user experience. And when it’s React Native, we bet you won’t regret it.

The post Top Reasons to Choose React Native for Cross-platform App Development appeared first on Top ITFirms - Result of In-depth Research & Analysis.