The Biggest Problem that Flutter is Facing!

Flutter, as you may have noticed is one of the fastest-growing Frameworks out there for Hybrid Application Development in 2020. Even for Web Development (still in Beta), Flutter Team is doing an amazing job making it production-ready. As of now, Startups are starting to choose Flutter for their Projects, which has led to a noticeable rise in Jobs for Flutter Developers.

With everything going this good.. where is the problem then? 🤨

Well, the problems I am going to talk about here is not with Flutter itself as a framework, but with the mindset with which it is being perceived by developers and companies.

Beginner’s Mindset

A large number of developers who start using Flutter are the ones who have next to no experience with Mobile App Development or Programming in general. Now don't take me wrong, it is not a bad thing at all, Flutter conceptually is made to make it easy for people to get started.

But when you have no experience with programming and you start with basic Flutter UI, it is likely for you to build a misconception that everything is going to be this easy with Flutter. In actuality, this is not true at all. Once you are done with simple UI, things are going to get pretty complex, especially when you have no prior experience with Mobile Application Development.

For creating enterprise-level applications or good applications in general you must have a good knowledge of:

1. Framework Language (Dart) Features and Concepts to a great extent.
2. Separation of Concerns: Because in Flutter there is no clear separation between your business logic and your UI code, so you have to manage that yourself. There are many good packages like get_it which can help you with this. Consider giving it a go.
3. UI State Management: For Bigger apps, UI is usually a bit too complex to manage. In such cases, to manage the state of your UI, you need to have a good understanding of Packages like provider to help you write better UI Code that is reactive to data changes and gives your app a smooth User Experience.
4. Writing Optimal and Managed CodeBase: With Complex UI, State Management Solutions, and Business Logic. It becomes crucial to write a well-managed codebase that is easy to read and modify. This includes using proper naming conventions, folder structures, package management, and so on.
5. Learning how things work at the Native Level: Whether it be Android or iOS at some point you have to create apps that rely on Background Processing, Notifications, Camera, or some other feature that require writing code at the native level. No doubt, there are a number of packages available for most common use cases but at some point, you will have to write some native code yourself.

Now, there are many other topics that a professional Flutter Developer has to know about but these are the most important ones…

When you go into learning and practicing these concepts, you need to have patience and persistence, and in most cases, people who have never written code or have never tried to learn to code before, don’t understand this. And this is where things go wrong….

Either they blame the Framework or find the domain of Mobile Application Development not suitable for them, or even worse, Skip the Concepts and keep creating things with limited knowledge and skip over things that they don’t think they’ll be able to understand.

This can lead to some major problems such as :

1. Unnecessary Hate for the Framework and Community
2. Poorly Coded apps on App Stores keeping new Developers and Companies from trying out the framework because of low performance.

This issue was there back in 2018 also, when I started with Flutter but instead of the issue being resolved, this has become more prevalent. And until we do something about it, this will keep harming the community internally.

So how can this be resolved?

Well, according to me, the only solution to solve this is to educate beginner developers to focus on their fundamental programming skills and understand the core of Flutter Framework before putting it into professional use-cases.

Rather than working on dummy UI projects all the time, developers should focus on solving real-world problems with their App Ideas. Only when you put your skills to use, they will get sharper with time and you will be able to learn much more than you thought you were capable of.

The only reason I have made this video is to keep beginners from making the same mistake that most Flutter Developers make. The problem that we have discussed here does not necessarily belong to the Flutter Community alone but to the whole Programming Community to some level.

Programming is one of the most in-demand skills in the coming future and it is up to us to help the community, not just grow, but also flourish.

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Happy Coding! ✌😁