With advancements and new technologies, the approach to mobile app development is rapidly transforming. While you may have to decide between developing traditional native apps and cross-platform applications, there are some other important choices along the way. Although cross-platform app development for your business is a great way to skip the rework and hassle of working for different platforms, choosing the right tools for it remains crucial.
When it comes to cross-platform technologies, there are two major options in the market:
- React Native
- Flutter
Now, you cannot simply opt for React app development solution or randomly pick Flutter to develop an application to support your business. Both of these frameworks have their own pros, cons, and specialties. Therefore, understanding and comparing them is important to make sure that you put the right resources to work. In this blog, we will understand both cross-platform frameworks well and compare them on various parameters to help you make the best decision.
What is React Native?
Although we have answered this several times in our previous blogs, we won’t mind repeating it once again for you. React Native is a popular open-source framework for building mobile applications using JavaScript and React. It was developed by Facebook and was released in 2015.
React Native allows developers to build cross-platform mobile applications for both iOS and Android using a single codebase. This is made possible by using a combination of native components and JavaScript code.
With React Native, developers can build mobile apps using familiar web development technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, while still delivering a high-quality native experience to users. React Native also provides a number of features, such as hot reloading and a large set of pre-built components, which make development faster and more efficient.
React Native has become a popular choice for mobile app development, particularly for startups and companies with smaller development teams because it can reduce development time and costs by allowing developers to write code once and deploy it across multiple platforms.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is an open-source mobile app development framework developed by Google. It was released in 2017 and has gained popularity among developers due to its ease of use and high-performance capabilities.
Flutter allows developers to build cross-platform mobile applications for both Android and iOS using a single codebase, which can help reduce development time and costs. Flutter is based on the Dart programming language, which was also developed by Google.
One of the main advantages of using Flutter is its fast development cycle. Flutter provides a hot reload feature that allows developers to make changes to the code and see the results instantly without having to recompile the entire app. This makes development faster and more efficient.
Flutter also provides a large set of pre-built widgets and tools that can be used to create high-quality and visually appealing user interfaces. Flutter widgets are customizable and can be used to create complex animations and designs.
In addition to mobile app development, Flutter can also be used to build web and desktop applications. Overall, Flutter has become a popular choice for mobile app development because of its high-performance capabilities, ease of use, and fast development cycle.
React Native vs Flutter: Key Differences
Let’s get into the actual discussion. Here are some of the key differences between React Native and Flutter mobile application development services. These differences are based on several important parameters from the development perspective that eventually affect an app’s performance for your business.
Language
React Native is entirely written in JavaScript using React. JavaScript, being one of the most popular languages and highly used across the web, offers considerable development benefits to React Native. It uses “the bridge” concept to interact effectively with the native elements.
Flutter is written using Dart programming language which was also introduced by Google in 2011. However, it’s rarely used by developers. Dart helps in compiling code segments more quickly.
Performance
React Native leverages the benefits of JavaScript and connects to the native elements using a bridge. This reduces runtime and improves the speed of development. However, to make these interactions more effective, it may be required to create multiple bridges which often slows down the entire process.
Flutter doesn’t require bridges to initiate the interactions, unlike the other framework. This improves the overall performance and makes the functioning faster. It automatically optimizes an application’s performance by deferred loading and tree shaking.
User Interface
React Native comes with more native elements for both Android and iOS. It offers additional, external UI kits that allow the developers to create impressive interfaces for your applications.
Flutter is well-known for how it uses proprietary visuals, interactive widgets, and its structural platform to induce excellent UI components into your applications. The built-in UI components replace the native elements, further improving the results.
To understand what are the benefits of developing an application with Flutter,
Documentation
React Native offers general documentation and is extensively dependent on external development kits. The documentation often may not be as straightforward as Flutter.
Flutter offers clear and easy-to-read documentation in a very clean, sophisticated format. This documentation is detailed, more streamlined, and straightforward.
Community Support
React Native was released as an open-source framework on GitHub in 2015. It’s one of the most popular frameworks with a growing community of more than 310,507 tagged questions according to a Stack Overflow survey.
Flutter is a relatively new framework with a smaller but growing community. More and more developers are now switching to Flutter considering its capabilities.
Popularity
React Native is a more popular cross-platform development framework than Flutter because of the speedy development it offers. It’s often surprising that React Native is still so popular. Unlike most frameworks that flourish and later become obsolete, this framework continues to hold onto its popularity. React app development solution still remains a preference among developers and stakeholders.
Flutter, as we said earlier, is a relatively new technology with a lesser developer count but has gained a lot of attention lately. However, Dart is a slightly new language, and developers might take some time to adopt it completely.
The Best Cross-Platform Framework For Your Project
As a Flutter and React Native mobile application services company, we have experience working with both. However, if you ask us which one is a better cross-platform framework, there may be no one-line answer. The decision of the better framework depends on your project preferences.
- Flutter is based on Dart which gives it a higher compiling rate than JavaScript. Thus it has a high performance by default. However, Dart programming language is used by only 6.54% of people. Therefore, there are several IDEs and less support for the language.
- React Native uses the “bridging” concept which often makes it slower than Flutter. Even though Flutter is faster, it turns into a huge file size which is another issue for the developers.
- React Native has an expansive community because of the ease of incorporating JavaScript. Developers have the necessary support at all levels, without having to learn an entirely new language.
- Flutter comes with integrated testing features. However, when using React Native, you will be required to use a third-party testing framework.
The well-established and known territory of JavaScript makes React Native a fair choice if you’re seeking a solution that doesn’t involve entirely new elements. However, Flutter has the capability to offer more stability and high performance than React Native. Before you finalize and invest in a React app development solution, make sure you have measured the possibilities with Flutter as well and vice versa.
These decisions often require technical assistance. At Narola Infotech, we bring in our 17+ years of experience to help clients get their desired software solutions. We are a team of 350+ IT experts who come together to provide you with high-performing, result-oriented applications. We are known for maintaining 100% client satisfaction and have served 1500+ clients across 50+ countries.
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