Flutter vs. React Native: Which to Choose?
Major Market Players and Development Frameworks: Flutter and React Native have emerged as the top contenders vying to prove themselves in cross-platform mobile app development. People looking to develop apps faster at a lower cost are scratching their heads as they find it extremely difficult to identify which framework best suits their app idea.
Making this exercise a bit easy, in this article, we have covered the most crucial points of comparison that will help you gain meaningful insights on how to choose either.
What is Flutter and React Native? a little peek
Flutter is a mobile app SDK that allows you to write an app in a database and build it on Android and iOS OR take it as a portable UI toolkit from Google to build natively compiled apps for mobile, 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 Dart programming language, which is rarely used and less popular in the developer community, through which we can easily conclude that React takes the lead.
B. Technical Architecture
React Native uses the JavaScript Bridge to communicate with native modules, and on the contrary, flutter has all the native components needed for app development in the Flutter Engine or in the framework itself, making its performance better than before.
C. User interface
Flutter apps look good on all OS versions due to its single code base and component-rich nature, which means the app will behave naturally and copy its native components, while Native’s app look like natives. 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. Considering that it uses the bridge and the native component, which requires separate optimization for each platform, which increases development time.
E. When not to choose
If your app design is platform-specific, requires multiple interactions with an operating system, needs a minimalistic UI, 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 native app development. of native applications. Since it is good for iOS app development.
F. Community Support
Since React was released long before Flutter, it has gained a significantly good amount of popularity, but Flutter is still in its early stages with a growing community.
G. Test support
The React Native community has no official support for testing and integration at the UI level; it uses 3rd party tools like Detox and Appium, while flutter has a rich set of testing features like widget testing which makes it much better than React.
In conclusion, flutter is still naive, but it is actively working to improve its stability and there are many apps built with Flutter, some of which are Alibaba Xianyu app, Google Ads app, JD finance app, Hamilton app, etc. And the popular apps built with React Native are Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Skype, Tesla, Wix, etc.
Taking the above comparison into account, you can probably determine which framework will be better suited for your mobile app development.
