Google starts a push for cross-platform app development with Flutter SDK
As part of its Mobile World Congress release slate, Google's Flutter SDK is hitting beta 1. Flutter is an open source mobile UI framework that allows developers to make super-fast, cross-platform mobile apps.
"But wait!" you're saying, "Google already has a mobile SDK! It's called 'Android.'" That's correct, but as usual, Google isn't attacking mobile app development with a single solution. It now has two mobile app SDKs: Android and Flutter.
As a cross-platform SDK, Flutter apps work on iOS and Android. It does a neat trick of kind of sidestepping both OS' UI frameworks. Flutter apps don't directly compile to native Android and iOS apps; they run on the Flutter rendering engine (written in C++) and Flutter Framework (written in Dart, just like Flutter apps), both of which get bundled up with every app, and then the SDK spits out a package that's ready to go on each platform. You get your app, a new engine to run the Flutter code on, and enough native code to get the Flutter platform running on Android and iOS.
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