Cross-platform apps are the major trend today in app development. These apps have gained popularity as these are accessible on multiple mobile platforms. The platforms for developing these apps have increased greatly in number making it easier for the developers to create cross-platform apps.
React Native vs Flutter
The market for the last couple of years had been dominated by React Native. React Native was introduced by Facebook and got an overwhelming response from the app developers. Not much behind, Google, last year, also launched its own Software Development Kit. Google Flutter is Google’s response to React Native for cross-platform app development.
React Native is a couple of years older than Flutter, hence internet giants are mostly using it. However, Flutter is also paving its way through to the developers and giving a tough competition.
Performance
With Google learning from React Native, Flutter edges ahead on the basis of performance. Flutter also holds the advantage of the JavaScript Bridge to connect with the native components.
Although React Native offers efficient and reliable performance in standard development, developers encounter problems while building hybrid apps. However, while developing native apps there aren’t any performance related issues.
Blocks for UI
The creation of blocks for User Interface, being a major part of development, helps us to judge between the technologies. And the huge gap between React Native and Flutter is clearly visible in this case.
React Native, at its core, relies more on the native components in both cases for Android and iOS. Sometimes, additional third-party support is required as well. On the other hand, Flutter works with its two sets of Proprietary Widgets – Material widgets and Platform Agnostic widgets.
Using these widgets, developers can create comprehensively customized UI designs. These UI designs are as well interoperable as native components.
Although all this seems good from outside, Flutter actually has a lot of drawbacks due to lack of significant components from its libraries. Also, React Native presents a great UX for a user making it just a wee bit better than Flutter in this scenario.
Documentation
As always the case with Google products, Flutter provides a well organized and efficiently smooth documentation, simplifying the job manyfold for the app developers. However, the documentation of React Native is not as efficient as Flutter. It is somewhat disorganized and clumsy. Adding to this, the documentation misses a lot of things as far as React Native is concerned. Here, undoubtedly, Flutter proves better than React Native.
Development Time
Time is money. And hence, short development time is the call of the hour. And the biggest advantages of React Native is it reduces the app development time quite significantly.
And there you have it. We have given you many if not all the tools to judge which framework to use. Both React Native and Flutter have their own set of pros and cons. While React Native has been there for a while, Flutter is quite new and needs some time to reach its full potential. But as always, the final choice is up to you guys.
Apps Built Using React Native and Flutter
