React Native Vs. Flutter: A Comparison of Pros and Cons

Mobile apps market is projected to hit $188.9 billion in revenue by the year 2020. With rising popularity of mobile apps, it has become mandatory for businesses to have their own mobile apps. All kinds of businesses-- whether a startup or an enterprise-- want to develop advanced mobile apps quickly and at less cost.

A cross-platform mobile app works great in saving time as well as money of businesses. But, most of the businesses are not sure which technology is right for cross platform mobile app development.

There are various tools help in hybrid mobile app development viz. React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, Kotlin Native, J2ObjC/Doppl (Android-centric cross-platform), Ionic2, Cordova/PhoneGap/Titanium, Unity, to name a few.

Have a look at some factual information about some popular hybrid mobile app development frameworks:

In this blog, we are comparing the two most popular tools for hybrid mobile app development i.e. React Native & Flutter, So let’s begin:

A Small Introduction

An open source framework backed by Facebook, React Native was released on GitHub that covered the way for combining both Android and iOS platform’s native APIs. Although, Google’s Flutter is a comprehensive move that allows developers create iOS and Android highly responsive native apps at the same time.

Flutter is a mobile application SDK (software development kit) built by Google which helps to create high-fidelity, high-performance, and extremely fast mobile applications that can run on both Android and iOS. What makes flutter different from other platform is that it has a thin layer of C++ or C code but most of the systems are implemented in Dart which is a general-purpose programming language created by Google. It helps developers to easily read, replace, or remove. It also gives developers a good control over the system.

Similarities Between Flutter and React Native:

1. Both of these platforms are designed for cross platform mobile app development:

Both React Native and Flutter offer rapid, superior, and optimum quality mobile app performances on different platforms including iOS, Android and UWP.

(PS: Flutter supports iOS and Android platform).

2. Both of these frameworks are backed by top tech companies:

Flutter is Google’s open-source SDK and React Native is offered by Facebook for hybrid mobile app development. Both of these tools have strong community of developers which is again a common factor between them.

3. Open-Source, Fast and Free:

Both Flutter and React Native are open-source and free SDKs that let mobile app developers create amazing mobile applications quickly due to their native like performances.

4. Detailed and updated documentation:

These frameworks’ communities are putting extra efforts in order to keep the documentation up-to-date with comprehensive resources and API references.

5. Excellent UI support and native like experience:

React Native framework uses fundamental user interface building elements as you use in iOS and Android in order to deliver the native like experience. In addition to this, Flutter makes use of rich widgets so as to provide remarkable native like experience on iOS and Android platforms.

6. Hot reloading & prompt modifications:

React Native framework supports “Hot Reloading” which is a crucial feature and it enables simultaneously running of new codes and at the same time keeping hold of mobile application state, despite recompiling. This makes development instant, faster, and efficient.

On the other hand, Flutter introduced “Stateful Hot Reloading”, and it supports immediate reflection of various changes without restart or in case of loss of mobile application state.

So now we have become quite familiar with the similarities of both of these frameworks. Now, we are going ahead with various differences of these frameworks that they have in the process, features and flow.

The Key Difference of React Native and Flutter:

Flutter uses Dart:

React Native lets coders develop a mobile app using JavaScript which does not need any introduction. Needless to say, Javascript has received humongous popularity be it a web, mobile, or server-specific source code.

On the other hand, Dart is pretty new to the mobile app developers. It uses modern features of multiple languages in order to code native apps beautifully. Again, you should keep in mind that there is not any styling and JS components. Also, there is no separation of style, templates, and data files. Dart is easy-to-use for those developers who have experience in developing an app in different OOP languages such as Java and C++.

Flexibility And Stability:

In terms of stability, there is not any significant difference as both of these frameworks are being managed by well-established tech communities.

If we talk about customization and flexibility, Flutter renders a rich set of customized widgets in order to build captivating experiences. On the other side, React Native offers seamless user experience via direct communication with the native platforms.

Flutter is still trying to make a reliable position in this highly competitive market due to the recent stable release, whereas React Native is enjoying the top position in the list of hybrid mobile app development tools.

Development Time of An App:

Leveraging cross-platform, some of the best mobile app development companies in India already save precious time that occupies generally in coding mobile apps in multiple languages.

In addition to that, React Native & Flutter are committed to providing quick time-to-market of a mobile app. You can use any ready-to-use components and third-party library to build a mobile app. A high-quality and customized range of widgets helps in creating a mobile app in lesser time as compared to native app development.

Performance:

Flutter wins over here because of its simplicity.

Although, React Native is quite popular for providing excellent UX on both the platforms. Flutter has an extra advantage of reusing the same code while in this React Native is less suitable because of its architecture. One more advantage of Flutter is that it has JavaScript layer that makes communication easier with other native components.

Let’s have a quick glance over the comparison table between react native and flutter:

Let’s Wrap Up:

In this blog, we have compared two popular hybrid mobile app development frameworks Flutter and React Native. Hope your most of the doubts have been cleared. These two frameworks have increased the demand of cross platform mobile apps. They not only save time but also save the cost of mobile application development.

There are many top software development companies in India which are using these frameworks in creating hybrid smartphone apps. If you are a business owner and want to have your own mobile app, you can hire the best mobile app development companies which use advance technologies and libraries to make your app out of the box.