Flutter Vs React Native – From Developer Point Of View??

Flutter Vs React Native From Developer Point

With the rising number of mobile internet users, there is huge traffic. When it comes to developing a mobile application using cross-platform technologies both Flutter and React Native is the best available option. So we will learn about which is best for your next project requirement.

What is Flutter? – An Overview Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.

Popular Apps Developed Using Flutter • Google Ads • Alibaba • Hookle • Hamilton App for Hamilton Music

Pros of Flutter: • Hot-Reloading • Rich Widget • Seamless Integration • Quick Shipping

Cons of Flutter: • Tools and Plugin – Plugin and third-party libraries may keep on updating and can be deprecated.

• Size of a Flutter App – The apps developed using Flutter are larger than 4 MB each. Although the Google team is working to optimize the size, this could be a concern for certain business houses, looking for small-sized apps. The inbuilt widgets in Flutter-made applications make their size larger.

• Operating Platform – Flutter is suited best for a Mobile Application but doesn’t work well for tvOS, Android auto, Smart Wearables, etc.

What is React Native? – An Overview • React Native is written with a mixture of JavaScript and JXL, a special markup code resemblant to XML. The framework has the ability to communicate with both realms – JavaScript-based threads and existent, native app threads.

• React Native also known as an RN is developed and presented to the world by Facebook in 2015, it works just like React but allows you to build apps for both mobile and desktop. The beauty of it is that you can code in JavaScript without having to master any specific coding languages a platform might require like Java, Swift, or Objective-C. React Native is focused on building a great user experience for mobile devices, which makes it a suitable option for apps that require high responsiveness and intuitive use.

Examples of popular apps created using React Native are as Follows

• Instagram • Facebook • Skype • Pinterest • Tesla React Native is a mature tool and has a huge community. Flutter started making huge adoption rates in 2017.

Pros of React Native: • Native rendering: Uses host platform to natively render APIs without the need for HTML or CSS markup.

• Performance: Translates the markup of an application to mimic authentic UI elements and yet maintains high performance.

• Ecosystem: Leverages rich ecosystem and UI libraries to automatically rerender app appearance with each state change.

• Debugging: Provides accessibility to intelligent debugging tools and error reporting.

• Hot-reloading: Allows hot reloading to add new codes directly into a live application.

Cons of React Native: • Compatibility & Debugging Issue • Lack of Custom Module • Native Support is still needed • Here we can compare both the framework using the below parameters.

• Programming Language • Technical Architecture

• Installation • Setup and Project Configuration • UI Components and Development API • Developer Productivity • Community Support • Testing Support • Build & Release Support • DevOps and CI/CD Support

Programming Language The key benefit of the Cross-Platform Development tool is the ability to use a single codebase for Android and iOS.

React Native – JavaScript React Native uses JavaScript to build cross-platform apps. JavaScript is a very popular language in the web community at the moment. It is commonly used with React and other popular JavaScript frameworks.

JavaScript is a dynamically typed language and anything can be done with JavaScript, which is good and bad at the same time.

Flutter – Dart It uses the Dart programming language which was introduced by Google in 2011 and is rarely used by developers. Dart syntax is easy to understand for JavaScript or Java developers as it supports most of the object-oriented concepts. So it’s easy to get started with Dart as there is great and easy-to-follow documentation available on the official Dart site here.

Technical Architecture: While Choosing Cross-Platform as a development partner it becomes necessary to understand their technical architecture.

React Native — Flux React Native architecture heavily relies on JS runtime environment architecture, also known as JavaScript bridge. The JavaScript code is compiled into native code at runtime. React Native uses the Flux architecture from Facebook. There is a detailed article on the core architecture of React Native here. In short, React Native uses the JavaScript bridge to communicate with the native modules.

Flutter — Skia Flutter uses the Dart framework which has most of the components inbuilt so it’s bigger in size and often does not require the bridge to communicate with the native modules. Dart has so many frameworks, like Material Design and Cupertino, packed inside which provide all the required technologies needed to develop mobile apps. The Dart framework uses the Skia C++ engine which has all the protocols, compositions, and channels. In short, Flutter has everything needed for app development in the Flutter engine itself.

Installation • The installation should be made straight forward whether it’s React Native or Flutter.

• React Native – NPM • Flutter – Binary Downloads from Source

UI Components and Development API React Native – Less in Component

The core React Native framework provides just UI rendering and device access APIs. In order to access most of the native modules, React Native has to rely on third-party libraries. React Native is too much dependent on third-party libraries. The full list of development components and the official APIs can be found here.

Flutter – Rich in Component Flutter framework is bundled with UI rendering components, device API access, navigation, testing, stateful management, and loads of libraries.

Hence this rich set of components removes the need to use third-party libraries. So if you get the Flutter framework, it means you will have everything needed for developing mobile apps. Flutter also has widgets for Material Design and Cupertino that allow developers to easily render the UI on both iOS and Android platforms.

Developer Productivity: Developer productivity is the key to building apps faster. So in this regard, it’s very important to be able to focus on app development without any kind of wait or distraction.

React Native: If the developer is skilled in JavaScript, then it’s fairly easy to use those skills for cross-platform app development. React Native has a hot reload feature which saves a lot of developer time while testing the changes in the UI. So in terms of IDE support, developers are free to use any text editor or IDE of their choice.

Flutter: Flutter also has a hot reload feature and it’s very easy to get started with the demo app. However, as the complexity of apps grows, developers would need to learn and adopt the new Flutter concepts. In addition, Dart is not a common programming language and there is a lack of support for it in many IDEs and text editors.

Community Support

As soon as developers Adopt any new technology they create a community to reach a wide audience as well as share knowledge and will help each other to learn and implement new technological things.

React Native: React Native launched in 2015 and has gained in popularity ever since.

There is a community of React Native developers on GitHub and lots of meetups and conferences around the world. Hence one of the most recent conferences on React Native was React Native EU held in Poland, but there are meetups taking place in almost every major city in the world.

Flutter: Flutter has been around for a while but it gained a lot of attention when Google promoted it at the Google I/O conference in 2017. So the flutter community is growing rapidly these days, meetups and conferences are taking place online. Hence the biggest event coming will be Flutter Live in December. So in short, the Flutter community is growing rapidly; yet, there are still not enough resources for developers to solve common issues

Testing Support There is always a testing framework associated with every mature technology to allow developers to create unit, integration, and UI tests for the apps.

React Native React Native is a JavaScript framework and there are a few unit-level testing frameworks available in JavaScript. So the tools like Jest can be used for snapshot testing. However, when it comes to integration or UI level testing, there is no official support from React Native. There are third-party tools like Appium and Detox that can be used for testing React Native apps but they are not officially supported.

Flutter: Flutter provides a rich set of testing features to test apps at the unit, widget, and integration levels. It has great documentation on testing Flutter apps. Hence flutter has a cool widget testing feature where we can create widget tests to test the UI and run them at the speed of unit tests.

DevOps and CI/CD Support: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery practices are essential for any app in order to get continuous feedback and avoid releasing buggy code.

React Native: React Native doesn’t have any official documentation on setting up CI/CD. However, there are some articles that describe CI/CD for React Native apps.

Flutter: It has a section on Continuous Integration and Testing which includes links to external sources. However, its rich command-line interface allows us to set up CI/CD easily. Nevercode has inbuilt support for CI/CD for Flutter apps.

Final Conclusion: React Native and Flutter both have their own pros and cons. Some of the industry experts have predicted that Flutter is the future of mobile app development. Considering the comparison above, it’s clear that Flutter has entered the cross-platform mobile development race very strongly. Let’s wait and watch!

Still, Looking for the best mobile application development company in Flutter and React Native?? We are at your service.