A little perspective about this topic:

I am not getting into introducing flutter and its utilities because there are many topics that are talking about it. You can find the best representation on the official website of Flutter.dev. So I will talk about How flutter changed my whole career in the mobile development industry. And I concluded what are the needed success keys for flutter to continue.

Flutter, the early beginnings

So, in late 2018 I started using the Flutter framework in some side projects to test some features and functionalities to compare it to native android development with Java and Kotlin, I figured out that it was easy to manipulate the code. So for that, I started with flutter and dart my journey. I joined all Flutter events and took all online courses and workshops to get deeper into it and collect more information, acquiring the needed skills to master it. But I found that it is not mature enough to replace the native code, also the React Native communities were providing more problem solutions and support. At that stage, I was filled with doubt that I wasted time and energy learning it and trying to work with it. Meanwhile, I was learning JavaScript to move to react native for mobile development, and I thank god that I stay with Flutter.

My First Job with Flutter

The first job that I landed, was my true and fresh start on Flutter. I got a cloned GitHub repo of a flutter application for selling and reservation tickets for events and public concerts, First of all, I found struggled to understand the code because was a lot to do, and many functionalities needed to change, I worked day and night to achieve the goals but I was able to work with State Management of Flutter properly and building custom widgets for specific purposes and that worked for me to enhance my capabilities to go deeper in flutter development. Also dealing with some hardware access features, here is where I found that flutter still needs improvements. After that, I worked in another app that provides online payments and money transactions, It was the turnover in my whole career ever.

Now!

For now, I still think that Flutter is still immature to compete with natives Kotlin or Swift, After many projects, failures, successes and a lot of bugs I can say are one of the best cross-platform Frameworks and the third choice after the two languages I mentioned earlier. Also, I am getting deeper into Dart to learn its advance of it and trying to apply programming techniques and knowing algorithms to conclude which is still enough to work only on it or needs some backups. I also found that the flutter dev team and community need to improve the mobile version before improving the web or desktop version because Flutter mainly is for mobile platforms. But the problem is with Android smartphones more than iOS platforms, because I needed to handle and gesture all different kinds of OEMs which are painful, very painful, especially the Chinese ones.

Until now I don't describe myself as a senior flutter developer because Flutter changes between every upgrade and version, you need always to keep up with it and try to find bugs and declare for enhancements in some points you need to develop your own core side, and this makes me talk about the reliability on flutter packages, I figure out that some packages needed to built in-house for upgradability and support different SDK version which is like now SDK 33 that flutter 3.1 support it but there some packages still not which causes problems in opening the app or make it crushes always.

My Future plans with Flutter

it is obvious I will stick with dart and flutter because it looks promising but I also think about the no-code platforms that provided mobile apps of the same quality as hand-developed apps and AI-generated apps. Also, I need to learn more about Swift and Kotlin because they have the superiority of dart in the mobile development industry. Maybe that will be another cross-platform solution that beats Flutter in some points or solve Flutter's weak points. But until that time Flutter is enough, for now, to do the needed job and build great apps for mobile, web and desktop and serve both developers and users.

About this Series

this series is about Flutter and Dart, I'd like to say this is my introduction to it until I share another topic that talks about dart codes and implementations, customizing widgets and more.

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