Windy City DevFest 2019 - Flutter: 60 Frames of A.O.T. Badassery

Speaker: Scott Stoll

This isn’t your daddy’s cross-platform solution. Let me dispel a misunderstanding right now. Unlike all of the other “cross-platform” solutions, Flutter doesn’t use bridges, proxies or interpreted code. It doesn’t normally ask the underlying framework to do things. Except for WebViews, which need to use JS and interpret it, other “cross-platform” solutions ask the frameworks to display the framework’s list view, text view or they ask the framework to display an image for them.

Flutter, on the other hand, says: “Give me an OpenGL canvas. Thank you. Now hold my beer.”

Flutter is 100% Ahead of Time compiled, machine code binary that runs independent of the underlying framework (just like a game engine). It draws straight to any OpenGL canvas you give it (even on Windows?) and has it’s own UI elements that are fully Material Design and Human Interface Design compliant. You’ll never have your app wrecked again because components you used were deprecated in the framework, because you aren’t using the components in the framework. (You hear that iOS?)

All Material Design and Human Interface UI components are implemented pixel-for-pixel. Your users will never be able to tell the difference between a Flutter app and an Android or iOS one unless you want them to. You can put Material Design interfaces on devices made before Material Design was even a thing and imagine being able to craft an iOS UX that’s backward compatible all the way back to iPhone6!

And it does all of this while adding less to the apk size than the ASL adds to your Android apps.

So, are you in your seat waiting for this talk to start yet or should I tell you more?