Do you want to build apps efficiently and reduce cost with cross-platform development but are confused about which technology to use then this blog is the right place to get free of your confusions.
In this article, we will compare the famous technologies Flutter and React Native from a developer’s point of view and help you gain an inside-out look so that you can choose what is right for you.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is a comprehensive app software development kit (SDK) that comes with various widgets and tools developed by Google in the year 2017. It gives developers an easy path to build applications for mobile(IOS, ANDROID), web, and desktop using a single codebase.
more about flutter…..
- It is an open and free source.
- It is based on Dart, an object-oriented programming language, which is comparatively easy to learn than other programming languages, especially for developers who are already familiar with languages like Java and C#.
- Flutter uses its own widgets which are fast, attractive, and easily customizable.
- Even Though Flutter was released in 2017 it looks mature for its age as it has been receiving new updates with effective improvements at a very fast pace.
Pros and Cons Of Flutter
Pros:
- From a developer’s point of view, it seems that flutter gives a more dynamic -and quick app development process. Due to the feature called Hot reload the changes that are made to the code can easily be seen in the application. This characteristic of flutter comes in very handy when you want to experiment with your code and want to see the changes it does to your application instantly.
- You have to write just one single code and using the same code flutter will help you build the application for both iOS and Android platforms. Isn’t that time-saving?
- Thanks to Skia Graphics Library which helps flutter apps to run smoothly and quickly. The reason why flutter delivers 60fps is that most of its work is done on GPU.
- As flutter has its custom widgets which are taken care of by the framework’s graphic engine.
- Apps created on flutter will look the same on old Android/iOS devices so you do not need to worry about supporting specific older devices for your applications.
Cons:
- Flutter being a recently developed platform will not always have the perfect functionality in its existing libraries so you would need to create certain custom libraries to cater to your need will take a big chunk of time.
- Applications written on flutter are bigger than the native ones.
- To enable automatic building, testing, and development you will need to use and manage custom scripts.
- Dart is not so widely known or used in comparison to JavaScript and because of that many developers that like statically-typed programming prefer using Native rather than Flutter.
- Flutter hasn’t been around for long, this is why it is not entirely stable.
- The framework and Dart language are changing rapidly, making it hard to maintain code for the long run.
What is React Native?
React Native is an open-source mobile application framework exactly like Flutter but is based on JavaScript.
- React Native can be used for cross-platform development.
- Both Android and iOS applications can be developed using a single codebase.
- React Native is developed by Facebook and was launched in the year 2015 in March.
- React Native uses the same basic User Interface building blocks as regular iOS and Android apps, in simple words instead of building in Java, Kotlin, or Swift you would be putting the same building blocks together, using JavaScript and React.
Mobile Apps Made Using React Native
Pros and Cons Of React Native
Pros:
- Like Flutter React Native also has the same feature wherein you can inject a new code directly into the running app and see the changes the code made in the app instantly.
- Exactly the same as flutter you can write a single piece of code to power 2 apps – covering Android and iOS platforms.
- JavaScript being a more used and popular language than Dart makes it easier for developers to use React Native.
- React Native has lets you build cross-platform apps in a way wherein you can decide accurately what solutions you want to use according to your project’s requirement and your preference.
- Let’s say you need to decide how you want to handle and store the data that is being used in many parts of your app, you can choose a router library, or select between JavaScript and TypeScript – you will hold the power to decide.
- React Native has been in the market for a long time which means it has a larger active and vast community, not only that but countless tutorials, libraries, and UI frameworks make it really easy to learn the technology and develop with it.
Cons:
- React Native supports basic components out of the box. On the other hand, Flutter is designed in such a way that the framework supports much more widgets. You could create most of the views with widgets that are already present and will require no additional effort.
- Unfortunately, many libraries are of either low quality or have been abandoned altogether.
- Applications that are written in React Native must be able to run in JavaScript code too. Android does not have this functionality by default thus your application will need to include that support JavaScript code.
- React Native is just a wrapper over native methods, so it requires a bridge to translate those calls into a native API.
- It has been recently observed that bugs on React Native have started to take longer to get fixed.
What Does The Future Hold?
Talking about Flutter, more and more companies and people are getting attracted by Flutter as it being a recently released platform and because of that Google continues to refine its tool.
As the word goes in the market Flutter is planning to bring in a major upgrade to Flutter wherein
users will be able to create applications for the web and desktop.
Companies like Alibaba and Tesla are already using Flutter, we can say that the future looks promising for the toolkit.
MVP(minimum viable product)-a product with minimum requirements and functions to understand the needs of its target audience. People now want to show off their MVPs very fast so that they can tell their investors or their clients what they are working on and this trend is experiencing quite an increase. Flutter is the perfect platform for doing it as it speeds up the development process and adds a phenomenal UI layout. Due to this point, the future of Flutter holds great potential.
Taking the focus to React Native, Facebook is planning to completely re-structure the technology on a large scale. The team is working as we speak to make React Native more efficient. The current users can directly suggest changes through an RFC process which makes the restructure worth the wait.
Some examples of the re-structure are…
- Hermes: An open-source JavaScript engine optimized for mobile apps that improves time interaction and lowers the app size.
