React Native Vs. Flutter: A better choice for 2020
Are you looking for developing mobile apps more quickly at a reduced cost? And choosing the best technology for your app is giving you a pain in the neck? Well, today in this article we’ll discuss the prime market leaders, flutter by google, and react native by Facebook. Because Flutter and react-native always make up to the developer’s final lists. Every growing industry is inclined towards mobile applications to stay relevant in the business world. Consequently, it becomes a need to choose the best platform with high speed and fewer resources that can build native apps without using Swift for iOS or Java for android. So in this post, we will compare both of these platforms from a developer’s vision. So that you can make the best choice according to your business needs.
What is flutter?
Flutter was introduced by Google in 2017. It is a UI toolkit used for developing an application for ios, windows, mac, android, and Linux. It. It is a cross-platform mobile development framework that uses the Dart language (a fast object-oriented language). It’s a free and open-source project, however, both Google and the flutter community participate in the growth and improvement of the platform. Top apps like google ads, Hamilton app, Xianyu app by Alibaba, the app for JD finance are created by flutter.
What is react native?
On the other hand, native react is an open-source mobile application framework unveiled by Facebook in the year 2015. It is used for developing applications for both Androidand iOS using a single codebase. It uses javascript as its language. Popular applications like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Wix, skype, and Facebook ads manager are created using react native platform.
In recent years cross-platform mobile development has gained much popularity because it enables you to develop a mobile application that runs on more than one platform. And If you are confused between which one should I go for? flutter or react native, then there is no exact answer to that. The right answer depends on your use cases and your business needs. Perhaps, you can consider some points that can push you to the crux of the matter. So let’s get started with the comparison. Here are some points that we will consider for comparison:-
- Hot reload support:- For hot reloading, both flutter and react-native got equal points. Because both include hot reloading. Hot reloading means, you inject code, save that code, and reload it on the mobile app at runtime. This is such an amazing feature that every single developer, who is working on native code, really misses out a lot.
- Unveiling date:- Now you might be wondering, how unveiling date can be a criterion. But the release date holds high potential. Because the member who is getting first into the market, always gets the upper hand in the competition. And here react-native was the first to land in the market. Although there are only two years of difference, flutter is giving tough competition and its community support is growing rapidly.
- Components:- We can design any component in both of them. But here is the twist. In react native, you get dearth of groundbreaking options to experiment with. You get a handful of things, which can be an advantage because you have to learn very fewer things but you can create any component using a third-party library. On the contrary, flutter is rich in UI components. If you don’t like to work with third-party components, you can go with flutter.
- Programming language:-Flutter uses dart as a programming language and react native uses javascript as its programming language. Here, react-native can have the upper hand. Because there is a huge community in the programming world that is working in javascript and dart can seem tougher to them in that context. So migrating into the mobile apps with react native can be a piece of cake, rather than learning a whole new language. Dart has also great features but it is less known in the programming community.
- Documentation:- On this point, my stars are clearly with flutter. The reason behind it that google provides well-written documentation of its products. And Flutter is no exception. For react native, we have to look at third-party documentation which is not much fun.
- Industry’ adaptation:– This is still a contentious question to put on. Because different people see this from different perspectives. There is no doubt people are adopting for flutter but a lot of companies are already working on react native.
- Community support:– There is no point of debate that the ball is in the react native’s court. As react native was released earlier than the flutter, it has grown its popularity. However, flutter is new, but it is fairly growing its community faster.
- Performance:– React native has a JavaScript bridge to interact with the native component, which restricts the performance to a small extent. But unlike react native, flutter doesn’t need any javascript bridge to interact with native components. Dart code is combined with the native machine code which eradicates the need for javascript bridge. This improves flutter’s performance.
The bottom line
It is a very fascinating time for mobile application development. The developer community is slightly moving away from old technologies and taking it to the next level. However, both the platforms reduce time and cost, and in addition to that, their third party libraries and ready to use components make it more effective to use them or build an app. And these are the key reasons based on which you can choose a framework for your app development. If you know dart, then choosing Flutter for you will be a no brainier, and If you operate with javascript, go with react native. If you want to build your app’s GUI using native components, you can pick react native. And if the brand first design is your priority, then flutter can be the better choice for you. Although flutter and react-native have their pros and cons. But in the above comparison, flutter seems to wins the race of choosing platforms. But let’s not predict the future of these platforms and see what time has contained for us.