Flutter, a robust and versatile UI toolkit from Google, has quickly become a favorable choice among developers globally since its initial release in 2017. Flutter is primarily recognized for designing beautiful, natively compiled applications for web and mobile from a single codebase, but what many may not know is its recent expansion towards desktop application development. Although still experimental, Flutter aims to deliver a robust framework for building full-featured, high-performance desktop applications.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is an open-source UI toolkit created by Google. It is used to create beautiful and responsive applications for various platforms – Mobile, Web, and Desktop, using a single codebase. Dart, a language developed by Google, is the primary programming language used in Flutter. Flutter's real power lies in its customizability, robust widget catalog, hot-reload functionality, and performance.

Why Choose Flutter for Desktop Applications?


Choosing Flutter for desktop application development brings the power of a modern, reactive framework and the Dart programming language. The main benefits include platform-specific adaptive widgets that are expressive and flexible, reduced code development time via hot-reload, and ease of integration with existing code.

Flutter for Desktop: The Current State

Flutter’s support for desktop is an experimental feature under active development. As of today, Flutter enables developers to create Windows, macOS, and Linux desktop applications. While the APIs are likely to undergo breaking changes, a few brave developers have already started experimenting with these platforms using Flutter – and the results are promising.

Getting Started With Flutter for Desktop

Developing desktop applications with Flutter involves extensive use of the Flutter command line interface, Flutter's desktop shells, and optionally, an editor that supports Flutter. To get started with developing desktop applications using Flutter, one must enable desktop support in the Flutter tooling, clone the Flutter repository, and then build the code in the desktop shell.


Note this feature is available on the master channel and is still a technical preview.

Conclusion

Despite being in the experimental phase, Flutter’s foray into the domain of desktop app development represents an exciting development in the tech paradigm. It brings a much-anticipated uniformity in the process of application development across platforms, increasing efficiency and coherence. Although it may take time for Flutter’s desktop support to mature fully, developers can now experiment with these features and contribute to its growth.


Indeed, with the advent of Flutter for desktop, the future of cross-platform development looks promising, replete with endless possibilities and opportunities.