In a world where mobile apps are at the center of brand competition, app developers need to choose their tech stack wisely to ensure better mileage for their clients. It is the choice of tech stack that can directly impact development time, cost, availability of quality resources, ease of maintenance and user experience. Naturally, they need to choose the right technology for developing apps.
Hybrid apps are outright rejected by ambitious app projects simply because of their compromising user experience. On the other hand, native apps take longer to build and consume a bigger budget and resources for initial release as well as updates. This is where cross platform development emerged as a great choice by bringing together value propositions of both. Yes, modern cross platform technologies such as React Native, Flutter and Xamarin can deliver almost native user experience in spite of allowing maximum code reusability for both iOS and Android.
But all these cross platform technologies also have their mutual differences and respective strengths and weaknesses. Hence developers are so keen on comparing them and weighing their good and bad before settling for one for their app project. As React Native and Flutter are considered to be strongest contenders for best cross platform technology choice, they are compared more often than others.
React Native is already the most loved cross platform development library that has been used in hundreds of successful app projects worldwide and commands a dominating presence with robust support from developer communities spread all over the globe. In contrast, Flutter arrived later but quickly rose to prominence and popularity simply because of its unique strengths and modular approach of development that particularly benefits startups and low budget app projects.
According to the Statista report, React Native is still the most preferred cross-platform development technology and is chosen by 42% of developers, while Flutter stands very close with a backing of 39% app developers.
Now let us start with our detailed comparison of these two dominant cross platform app development technologies.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is an open source mobile UI development kit or framework based on Dart programming language. Feature rich cross platform apps made with Flutter can deliver highly native user experience for iOS, Android, desktop and the web.
Key Strengths of Flutter
Let’s now have a quick look at the key strengths of Flutter one by one.
Fast Paced Development
Flutter has several attributes ensuring quicker development. While maximum code reusability ensures simultaneous development for multiple platforms, hot reload feature ensures faster code changes and instant evaluation. The out of the box access to native rendering engine further lowers dependence on third-party tools and makes development faster. Lastly the presence of custom widgets allow easier and faster UI design without relying on third party tools.
Unparalleled UI Design
Flutter relies on a lot of UI design widgets serving different purposes such as rendering, animation, gestures, layout and many others. These widgets apart from offering complete control over all design elements of the app ensures optimum flexibility and ease in shaping the user interface step by step.
Guaranteeing Native Experience for All Platforms
Flutter allows reusing the core codebase for app versions to run on iOS, Android, desktop and the web while ensuring native user experience in all these different hardware and OS platforms. Flutter achieves this flexibility and user experience through its preloaded Skia native rendering engine.
Hot Reload
With flutter, whenever you make any changes in code and save the changes, instantly the changes are reflected in the app functioning. This happens due to the hot reload feature. Any app that needs to be updated frequently will find this feature incredibly helpful.
High Performance
For communicating with the native UI layer Flutter comes loaded with native rendering engine and doesn’t need to depend on a Javascript bridge. This ensures a much faster development and faster as well as smooth native app performance.
The Power of Dart Programming Language
Flutter uses Dart for coding and it is a powerful object-oriented programming language. Dart, apart from offering simple and expressive syntax, comes with several CSS components to make the app design easier.
Customizable Widgets
Flutter comes with a whole array of rich and customizable widgets that can be used for UI design across the lines of Android, IOS and Material Design principles. Apart from ensuring optimum customisation Flutter offers smooth, crisp and engaging user experience across all platforms.
Inbuilt Rendering Engine
Flutter offers Skia rendering engine to communicate with native UI layer and thus completely avoid the need of communicating with the native UI layer through a JavaScript bridge.
What is React Native?
React Native is a JavaScript library used for developing cross platform and native apps across both iOS and Android. Ensuring optimum code reusability while building fully functional apps equipped with native UI design, is the key strength of React Native.
Fast paced programming
React Native just like Flutter allows optimum code reusability across both iOS and Android and further adds to the pace of development through hot reload feature that ensures instant impact of the coding changes during development or updates.
The Power of JavaScript
React Native codes are written with JavaScript, the most popular and widely learned programming language. This ensures easier learning curve, easier availability of resources and well established coding practices nourished by several app projects.
Maturity as a Library
React Native is already more than 5 years old and in all these years it has been used across a multitude of successful app projects across all niches. No wonder, React Native is regarded to be the most robust and feature rich development library.
Huge Community Support
React Native enjoys the support of a massive and robust developer community and boasts of unlimited number of tutorials, UI libraries, frameworks and plugins that are constantly developed and made available for React Native app projects. This huge community support and the background of resources gives React Native developers additional strength in their projects.
The best thing about most libraries and tools created by React Native developers is that they are platform agnostic which means they can used for both native and cross platform app projects.
Which of the two frameworks is better?
Answering this question without knowing about the size and nature of the app project in question is very difficult. Actually, both have their own strengths and weaknesses. Certain strengths can be crucial for one project while other projects will find strengths of other frameworks to be more important.
In terms of faster development, code reusability and reliability, both actually stand quite neck to neck whether in features or in capabilities. Flutter because of its rendering engine can ensure a better development pace, while React Native with its established best practices and reusable components and resources can still ensure high efficiency.
In one particular area, Flutter has an edge and it is nothing but the presence of the native rendering engine. While React Native needs to rely on JavaScript bridge to communicate with native UI layer, Flutter enjoys ready help of native rendering engines. This puts React Native apps at disadvantage in terms of native performance when compared to Flutter.
As for programming languages, both have equal strengths and weaknesses. Flutter uses Dart, which is more efficient and feature rich but less popular. You cannot get a lot of expert Dart programmers around. React Native uses JavaScript which is a widely popular and used language and finding great resources with JavaScript skills is not much difficult.
As for community support, React Native has already an edge and is still the most loved framework globally. Though, Flutter is not way behind and is fast catching up with the popularity of React Native. In fact, according to a StackOverflow report, Flutter enjoys a popularity score of 68.8% in sharp contrast to React Native’s 57.9% score.
React Native still relies a lot on third-party libraries, plugins and tools to shape the user experience of an app. In contrast, Flutter almost offers everything out of the box. Flutter thanks to its customisable widgets also allows starting low and simple and making incremental changes easily in the later stage of app life cycle. This modular approach of Flutter makes it a better option for startups and small budget app projects.
Conclusion
So here we are. None of these technologies can be declared a clear winner over the other. Both have their strengths, weaknesses and respective ideal use cases. What seems to be a bitter rivalry, comes out to be a scope to understand the pros and cons of two cross platform technologies. Well, that’s the best way to describe so called flutter vs react native comparison.