flutter vs react

As mobile apps become the norm, every business owner is seeking to develop a mobile application. But when it comes to development, the confusion often lies in deciding whether to develop native apps or hybrid apps. The choice between the two is crucial as each has its own benefits.

However, hybrid apps save time and money since they don’t have to release two separate apps for Android and iOS. Hybrid apps comprise just one codebase and only one development team – this helps make the process more efficient! Consequently, your business can provide a single mobile app for both platforms, which is extremely cost-effective. The cost-effectiveness, less time consumption, and the need for a single development team attract most people and they end up choosing hybrid mobile apps for their business.

 

Popular Hybrid App Technologies – Flutter v/s React Native

Flutter and React Native are both cross-platform technologies used to develop hybrid mobile apps. The right framework is critical to the success of your project in order to make it productive and feature-rich. But before picking one, you should know both the pros and cons of each. But the question is Flutter or React Native? Which one is going to take the top position in 2022? 

 

Flutter

A Dart-based interface-building tool. Or to put it another way, it is Google’s UI framework. With Flutter, developers can build apps for desktop, mobile, and web platforms with a single codebase.

 

  • Faster development and deployment 

Fast and easy UI exploration, adding features, and fixing bugs are all possible with Flutter’s hot reload feature. Upon minor code changes, a preview of the app is displayed before the code is compiled and rebuilt. As a result of fast development and the cross-platform nature of the tool, fast time-to-market is achieved.

 

  • Quality documentation

An open-source project cannot function without quality documentation. Flutter. dev itself is sufficient for anyone to start building Flutter projects without any previous experience. The community itself fills in any gaps with custom articles and open git repositories for unique use-cases whenever there is some information or tools missing. 

 

  • Increased time to market speed

Compared to other development frameworks, Flutter works faster. The same app developed separately for Android and iOS will require at least two times as many man-hours as one developed with Flutter. In short, you don’t have to write any platform-specific code to accomplish the desired objectives. In turn, this results in the quickest development and the fastest launch of the application.

 

  • Easily customizable

We offer feature-rich user interfaces that are fully customizable down to a pixel. By layering the architecture, highly detailed UI components can be generated without sacrificing the speed of rendering. And, of course, every component can be animated as well.

 

  • Growing beyond mobile applications

Rather than mobile applications, Flutter has expanded its functionalities to other domains such as Flutter web, Flutter embedded, and Flutter desktop. Hence without modifying the source code, Flutter applications can be run on browsers too.

 

React Native

Developed by Facebook, React Native is a native UI framework based on React.JS.The framework is open-source and had a peak of popularity. The major advantage is that it is written in javascript. Hence the javascript knowledge is enough to develop mobile apps using this framework.

 

  • Fast development  

It takes far less time to load a page using React Native. One of the major advantages of React Native is that pages generated by this framework can be seen more quickly than those from others. The advantage is that Google will scan these pages more quickly and attribute a higher ranking to them.

 

  • Code reuse and reduced cost

It is possible to deploy React Native apps both for iOS and Android by using the same code. In addition to saving considerable time and money, this method also significantly decreases the development cost.

 

  • Live reload

It comes with a ‘live reload’ feature, allowing you to see the effect of your most recent modification to the code immediately. This will help developers to view the changes as soon as they modified the code.

 

  • Effortless Debugging

React Native introduced a tool named Flipper to enable fast and efficient debugging of codes.  In addition to this tool, there are some commands that can help troubleshoot and fix errors in your development environment. The development team can use this feature to save time and ensure excellent code that is error-free.

 

  • Community driven

One of the biggest advantages of react native is its community. As developers from around the world started contributing, it became increasingly popular.

 

A comparative study

In terms of available features, both frameworks appear to be similar. But there is a perception that Flutter is not likely to be widely used because it uses an unfamiliar programming language. In my opinion, how a framework tackles the cross-platform development problem is more significant than its programming language popularity. So, I did a quick search on the internal architectures of both Flutter and React Native to figure out the following facts. 

 

  • UI consistency in flutter apps

The UI elements in React Native are platform-specific. Different platforms define their own design concepts. A platform may have UI elements that another platform may not have. But Flutter comes with its own UI kit. Thus, all Flutter apps look the same on every platform. 

 

  • Provides an effective layout system

When it comes to the layout system, flutter offers a widget-tree-based layout. The specialty of this layout is that one can easily imagine how a widget will render on the screen. Hence you don’t need to hire separate UI developers to handle this if you choose Flutter. Anyone can easily understand the widget-tree concept easily. 

 

  • Flutter supports all popular platforms

Only Android and iOS platforms are officially supported by React Native.  Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, macOS, Fuchsia, and Web are all supported by Flutter.  All the flutter plugins work well on all the platforms that flutter supports.

 

Closing words,

In studies, Flutter has been shown to be the most effective at detecting cross-platform issues. Due to its JavaScript runtime-based architecture, React Native cannot improve its performance as much as Flutter. From the studies I had on this topic, a piece of advice that I can give you is, you don’t need to be intimidated by Dart’s unfamiliarity when developing apps with Flutter. It is promising that the Flutter framework is going to be the future of cross-platform technologies.