(cache)Converting Android Native Apps to Flutter Cross-Platform Apps | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

Converting Android Native Apps to Flutter Cross-Platform Apps


Abstract:

Flutter is a development framework for building applications for mobile, web, and desktop platforms from a single codebase. Since its first official release by Google les...Show More

Abstract:

Flutter is a development framework for building applications for mobile, web, and desktop platforms from a single codebase. Since its first official release by Google less than a few years ago, it is gaining so much popularity among mobile application developers, even being regarded as a game-changer. There are, however, millions of existing native apps in use that meet the requirements of a particular operating system by using its SDK. Thus, one natural question to ask is about rewriting an existing native app in Flutter. In this paper, we look at the technical side of this question by considering Android apps written in Java. In a small case study, we create a Flutter version of our existing Android app written in Java to support both Android and iOS by rewriting the entire app in Flutter. We share our development experience by discussing technical issues, problems, and challenges associated with such a rewriting effort. We describe our approach as well as the lessons that we learned.
Date of Conference: 15-17 December 2021
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 22 June 2022
ISBN Information:
Conference Location: Las Vegas, NV, USA

I. Introduction

A mobile app development today generally implies the development of two versions, one for Android and the other for iOS. An alternative approach is to create a so-called cross-platform app that runs on multiple platforms. Flutter is a cross-platform development framework for building apps that runs on multiple platforms including both Android and iOS [7]. Since its official release by Google in December 2018, it is gaining so much popularity among mobile app developers. It is even being regarded as a game-changer by some developers. One of the reasons for its rapid popularity is that it is claimed that Flutter has solved the performance issues associated with cross-platform development approaches such as Apache Cordova, Microsoft Xamarin, and Facebook’s React Native [2].

References

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