Chapter 1
What Is Flutter?
IN THIS CHAPTER
How mobile apps fit in with hardware and software
What makes Flutter great
Alternatives to Flutter
Mobile app and Flutter terminology
Before you learn how to program mobile apps with Flutter, it's important to understand the big picture and how mobile apps fit into it. No doubt about it: Mobile phones are complicated beasts. So how do they work? What makes them tick? What's going on inside each of those remarkable gadgets?
All About Hardware and Software
A mobile phone is really a small computer. And, like any computer, a mobile phone operates on several layers. Figure 1-1 shows you a few of those layers.
Hardware is the stuff you can touch. It's the bottom layer of the diagram in Figure 1-1. Hardware consists of items like circuitry, memory, and the battery.
Electrical signals that travel along the hardware's circuits make the hardware do what you want it to do. These signals encode instructions. Taken as a whole, these instructions are called software.
When people create software, they don't describe each electrical signal that travels ...
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