Major Market Players and Development Frameworks – Flutter and React Native have become top contenders vying to prove themselves in cross-platform mobile app development. People looking to develop applications faster at lower cost are scratching their heads as they find it extremely difficult to identify which framework best suits their application idea.
To make this exercise a bit easier, in this article we have covered the most important points of comparison to help you gain meaningful information about choosing either one.
What is Flutter and React Native? A little glimpse
Flutter is a mobile application SDK that allows you to write an application to a database and compile it on both Android and iOS OR take it as a portable user interface toolkit from Google to create native compiled applications for mobile devices. , web and desktop from a single code base.
React is a Facebook JavaScript framework used to write real native mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Comparison factors
A. Programming language
React Native uses JavaScript as a programming language that is widely used by web developers, making it easy to adopt. While Flutter uses the rarely used and less popular Dart programming language in the developer community, through which we can easily conclude that React takes the lead.
B. Technical architecture
React Native uses JavaScript Bridge to communicate with native modules and on the contrary, flutter has all those native components needed for application development in Flutter Engine or the framework itself, which makes its performance better than the old one.
C. User interface
Flutter applications look good on all versions of the operating system due to their unique code base and component-rich nature, which means that the application will behave naturally and copy its native components, while the components of the Native app look like native ones. So if you want your app to look almost the same on all platforms, you can use React.
D. Time to market
React is of course faster in development but slightly less than flutter. Keeping in mind, it uses the bridge and native component which requires separate optimization for each platform which increases development time.
E. When not to choose
If your application design is platform specific, requires multiple interactions with an operating system, needs a minimalist user interface, and is particular about phone hardware, flutter is not the framework to choose. You should go for native app development, whereas if your app requires custom communication via Bluetooth, you have to handle a complicated task in the background, and you are looking to develop an Android-only app, then surely you should go for development. of native applications. Since it is good for iOS application development.
F. Community support
Since React was released long before Flutter, it has gained a great deal of popularity, but flutter is still fledgling in its stage with a growing community.
G. Supporting evidence
The React Native community does not have official support for UI level testing and integration; It uses third-party tools like Detox and Appium, while flutter has a rich set of testing features, such as widget testing, that do much better than React.
In conclusion, flutter is still naive, but it is actively working to improve its stability and there are many applications built with Flutter, some of which are Alibaba’s Xianyu application, Google Ads application, JD finance application, Hamilton application, etc. And the popular apps built with React Native are Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Skype, Tesla, Wix, etc.
Considering the above comparison, you can probably calculate which framework will best suit your mobile app development.