Advantages of Flutter Over React Native

Advantages of Flutter Over React Native

React Native and Flutter are the leading cross-platform app development frameworks that are widely used in the technological industry. But what made these frameworks so popular? Their development speed, robust support, and code reusability are some of the key reasons why these frameworks are so popular among developers.

But which is better? Flutter or React Native?

Flutter is considered better than React Native because of many reasons. Here in this blog, we are going to discuss those reasons. But before we move forward let’s first have a quick overview of React Native and Flutter.

What is Flutter?

Developed and maintained by Google, Flutter is an open-source framework that is launched in May 2017. It is used to build, test and deploy multi-platform applications by using a single codebase. It is trusted by many brands and has gained massive popularity among developers and a mobile app development company worldwide.

As already said it is an open-source framework and so has good community support from developers globally.

Flutter apps provide a native app-like performance and that also by using the same codebase for different platforms. As per a report by Statista, Flutter is the choice of 39% of developers for cross-platform app development.

What is React Native?

React Native works on the motive of “code once, write anywhere”. It is an open-source UI framework that helps to develop truly native apps. React Native was launched by Facebook in 2015 and since then it has become very popular.

From cross-platform apps to web apps, React Native helps to deploy a variety of development projects. Currently, it provides support for only Android and iOS platforms but it soon will expand in the near future.

Tech giants like Facebook, Instagram, and Palantir are already using this framework in their app development.

Advantages of Flutter over React Native 1. Native Performance The performance factor is very crucial in cross-platform applications and in various devices, it varies according to its sort of specifications. Particularly, when it comes to app performance, Flutter performs better than React Native.

React Native uses JavaScript as its source programming language and has two separate modules: Native UI and JavaScript engine. It targets platform-specific UI elements according to the changes in React state. Alternatively in most scenarios, it uses a JavaScript engine to run the application’s JavaScript. Both of these function calls goes through a JavaScript bridge and in the end React Native bundles the application with a JavaScript engine.

Flutter does not have these JavaScript runtimes and it uses binary messaging channels to communicate with the Dart and native code. Additionally, it has the support of the C++ engine which makes the development speed faster.

2. Consistent UI In React Native, if the application will run on an iOS device then it will only render native iOS UI elements. Each platform whether it will be Android or iOS has its own unique concepts for designing UI elements. In many cases, some platforms have UI elements while others don’t. That’s why in the case of React Native even small and simple UI changes, demand testing on multiple platforms.

While Flutter has its own UI toolkit which means the Flutter app will look the same on every operating system. The flutter-theming feature helps to change the app’s theme according to a user’s particular operating system. Flutter helps to build a consistent user experience according to all operating systems with a consistent GUI layer.

3. Productive Layout System React Native layout system is based on the FlexBox concept. All react native app developement service need to be familiar with the CSS FlexBox styling to provide a consistent layout on different screen sizes. Many times developers face a lot of challenges to do this advanced CSS styling and often rely on the UI/UX developers to fix these issues. Therefore to build the layout of the React Native app, programmers need to understand the CSS FlexBox syntax thoroughly.

Flutter has a widget build context-based layout system which means Flutter app developers can imagine how a particular widget will look on the screen. More UI/UX designers or CSS FlexBox experience is not required in the case of Flutter. Flutter’s tree-based layout system will also increase the speed of the development process.

4. Support For All Popular Platforms Officially React only supports Android and iOS platforms. However, if you want to build a desktop app by using React Native then there are several options also available than can be used. Two branches of React Native are also backed by Microsoft: react-native-windows and react-native-macOS. But there is no full-featured React Native part for Linux till date.

In contrast, Flutter officially supports all the popular platforms such as Android, Windows, Linux, macOS, and the web. All of these operating systems use Skia as the same rendering backend. Mostly all popular Flutter plugins work on these supported platforms.

5. App Deployment & Automation After a long process of development, deploying the app on platform-specific stores takes a lot of effort and time. Especially for cross-platform mobile applications, the process is much harder.

React Native does not provide any particular well-defined steps in its official documentation for automation to release the application. Developers had to follow all the manual steps for deploying the React Native-based applications according to the respective app markets.

On the other hand, Flutter has well-defined Flutter documentation, and by following all the steps according to the documentation developers can quickly deploy and release the apps. These automation tools are one of the biggest advantages of Flutter app development services.

6. Testing Support React Native comes with several unit testing frameworks available with JavaScript but it doesn’t give any official support for testing the application. React Native app testing is done through third-party tools such as Appium and Detox.

While Flutter has different and prominent testing features to do unit tests, widget tests, and integration tests. Also, its official documentation has all the steps regarding all these tests which developers can opt for if they face any kind of issues during the testing of an application.

7. Built-in APIs & UI Components Flutter has rich UI rendering components that are beautifully designed to help to make the user interface for your next Flutter project. All you have to do is copy, and paste, and it is done. This helps to save time during the development process with almost zero dependencies. Along with UI components, it also provides support for APIs, state management, and many other useful libraries.

On the other hand, apps built with React Native use third-party tools for rendering specific UI components.

Conclusion To conclude, React Native and Flutter have both their advantages and disadvantages.

Though React Native was launched two years earlier than Flutter and it is still new and growing. Flutter uses Dart as its programming language which is not that popular in comparison with JavaScript.

You can also take the assistance of a Flutter web development company to know more about Flutter's pros and cons.

Article Source: https://medium.com/@DianApps/advantages-of-flutter-over-react-native-bd1a988f2 69c