find the best technology stack for mobile app development - flutter vs react native

Mobile apps are gaining immense popularity worldwide. Offering an innovative technology-driven mobile app is the dream of every business today. Developers are entrusted to choose the right app framework for a faster and low-cost mobile app development.

As we will soon usher in 2021, most developers have to choose the right mobile app framework for the future. The choice of the right app framework is largely driven by a faster app development turn around along with reduced costs and cross-platform development capabilities.

Compare the two leading app framework-Flutter vis-à-vis React Native

In this article, we will compare the two leading app framework, Flutter and React Native, and help you decide which one to go for. From a developer's perspective, the two leading cross-platform app development technologies that are creating the buzz worldwide are React Native by Facebook and Google Flutter.

Both Apple and Google have offered the native tools and technologies to create apps seamlessly, such as Xcode and Swift on iOS, and Android studio and Kotlin/Java on Android. However, this requires developers to learn both new technologies.

To make developers’ lives easy, software development organizations have used cross-platform solutions over native solutions to create apps on both iOS and Android using a single language to build apps quickly. With the launch of React Native and Flutter, the developers can build cross-platform apps using a single language.

Facebook started React Native, which they made it open source in 2015. Google promoted flutter since 2017. However, Flutter witnessed a larger response for adoption by developers since 2017.

Flutter is a portable UI toolkit that enables cross-platform app development. It brings along a comprehensive app Software Development Kit (SDK), complete with widgets and tools to enable developers to build natively compiled mobile, desktop, and visually attractive web applications.

React Native is a JavaScript supported open-source application development framework used for Cross-platform app development. It helps create mobile apps using JavaScript language for both Android and iOS. It uses a single codebase and the same design as React.

Flutter Pros:

• Hot reload results in a fast coding
• Two mobile platforms with a single codebase
• Less testing, down by up to 50%
• The faster App development process
• Fascinating designs the users will admire with Stronger UI
• Same app UI even for older devices
• Perfect for MVPs

React Native Pros:

• Fast refresh results in a fast coding
• Two mobile platforms with a single codebase
• JavaScript preferred and widely popular language for app development
• Freedom of choice for Developers
• Relatively higher maturity
• Vast and active community support
• Easy to learn and adapt to React developers
• Less testing, down by up to 50%

Gazing Flutter and React Native from different perspectives:

From the Programming Language perspective

React Native Language is JavaScript, which is a popular language used with React and other JavaScript frameworks. Flutter Language is Dart. The easy availability of documentation on the Dart site made it for developers easy to get started.

From the technical architecture perspective

You need to choose the right technical architecture while going for a cross- platform mobile app development framework. Flutter offers everything needed for your app development, as Flutter contains all the needed technologies to develop mobile apps within it. React Native needs a bridge to communicate with its native components.

From the ease of installation point of view

React Native installation is easy for developers with JavaScript background, but they still need to learn Node Package Manager for the installation.Flutter installation is easy and developers need not learn new packages for the installation as the documentation is easily available.

Ease of getting community support

The React Native community support is enormous and growing in size. Flutter is fairly new, but growing fast in terms of community support and will soon catch up.

App framework DevOps and CI/CD support

Flutter apps can be easily and painlessly set up on CD/CI services by leveraging its strong CLI tools, while React Native does not provide official instruction for CD/CI practices.

Flutter vs React Native-At a Glance

Both Flutter and React Native offer a free open-source framework for app development.While the programming language for Flutter is DART, for React Native it is JavaScript which most developers are familiar with.Both deliver great native performance for app development.React Native uses native components, and after an OS UI upgrade, the apps will be upgraded instantly. Flutter is much faster than native development.

Concluding Remarks:

Development firms prefer Flutter over React Native. Flutter is improving fast, and Google is relentlessly refining its tool. As a result, Flutters is turning out to be a popular choice for the App framework for development. Flutter, as envisioned by technologists, is going to be the future of mobile app development framework. In the present, Flutter seems to have a clear competitive edge over React Native.