React Native vs.Flutter vs. Ionic Which is Challenging Platform for Your App

Smartphone apps have changed the way we used our phones previously. With the growing use of smartphone & its high-end processors, the app also has to perform well to make it worthwhile. You probably have noticed that most of the high performing apps with impressive designs and animations are downloaded the most. It means that if your app is not performing well or it serves lousy user experience, you will be out of the race. It does not just end up losing your valuable customers but also affects your business & its value.

Performance is a crucial part for any app development project that includes many factors such as load time, speed, network, device, responsiveness, execution, and obviously user experience. This is how, the performance of your app is powerful enough to make or break your business in many ways.

If you compare different app development platform, Native helps to deliver faster performance, but we can’t ignore next-generation technology like is Flutter and Ionic.

So which technology you should use in your next app development project? React native, flutter or ionic?

Let’s dig-in!

• React Native

Facebook has built the React Native framework as open-source JavaScript programming language along with the support of React libraries. After that, developers have found React Native as a multi-platform development solution for building apps for both Android and iOS. Also, it uses combine markup of JS and XML that is known as JSX. However, such apps can have easy access to native features like the camera, location, etc.

• Ionic

Ionic is one of the hybrid app development frameworks that allow you to develop highly collaborative cross-platform apps that can be used on any operating system. The main characteristic of ionic is fundamental aspects, comprehensive signs, and personalized tools to improve accessibility.

• Flutter:

Flutter is a Google Powered player that delivers an excellent native experience on both Android and iOS platforms.e.g.– FlutterBlue. In just two years since its launched Flutter is drastically grown popularity and become part of the competition with React Native and other app development platforms. As backend Flutter uses Dart programming language, which is also developed by Google & have many advanced features.

Comparison between React Native vs. Flutter vs. Ionic

Core Differences:

To deliver a native experience on Android & iOS, React Native uses its library & JavaScript while Ionic uses web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript & Cordova plugins. But Flutter is different from it because it uses Dart language that has modern approaches, multi-paradigm, and OOP for building cross-platform apps.

Developer Community:

Both the Native and Ionic have powerful community support compared to Flutter, which is a new player in the race of app development platform. Since the six years of Ionic launched, it covered vast app developers as a part of their community that helps to contribute in bug solving and new updates. But, Flutter has already gained popularity for building high-performing native apps by convincing many app developers to learn Dart. Being new in the Market, Flutter is rapidly growing with lightning speed compared to all available platform with the most reliable support of giant Google tech communities.

Performance:

As we have talked earlier, perform is one of the main deciding factors for choosing among three app development platforms. However, performance can be measured depending on many factors, including code writing but measuring performance on run time basis will be quite helpful. Native allows you to develop an app that can have a native look & feel with the use of its APIs & components. While Ionic uses web technologies to create hybrid cross-platform apps with the use of plugins and third-party packages. Both the platform serves excellent performance, but Flutter is serving something different because there is no native transition or bridges that help to connect with the native environment. And, Flutter is still new in the Market and uses Dart for developing apps. It is yet a long way to improvise its platform capabilities and other things to compete.

Platform Architecture & Code Execution:

Native lets you to write your code once & utilize the same code across the different platforms, which helps developers to save their time and efforts. But, Native is rocking the floor with its UI components & Hot Reloading feature that allows the developer to inject new code in runtime. This feature is quite useful when you are tweaking the UI. Same way, Ionic offers same code reusability concept that takes a single code on any app development platform. While Native is just using Javascript, you are free to use Ionic with Angular, React, Vue, or JavaScript. And if you are stuck in the middle of app development, their wide community is there to support you for throughout building highly-interactive apps in no time.

However, Flutter is not behind in the race to offer high-quality performance with the Dart. Flutter’s Engine is easily connected with SDKs that provides a modern set of features for creating beautiful UI & UX. Since the Flutter was launched to fill the existing gaps of app development performs, it allows you to create a powerful app with better performance, tangled graphics with less human efforts. Moreover, Flutter rendering engine offers their own widgets to build app for its high-performance. These Flutter widgets are fast, pretty, and customizable that helps you to create an eye-catching look and feel, which gives serious competition to other app development platforms.

Quality Assurance testing process is much faster if you are using Flutter. Because it supports the same code reusability concept like Native & Ionic with one codebase. If you are developing your app considering older or upcoming new devices, Flutter is always there by your side to give same app look across all the versions of Android & iOS. This Flutter feature will help you to maintain your wider audience at no additional costs because Flutter apps can be easily run on Android Jelly Bean or newer, as well as iOS 8 or newer version without any hustle.

Platform's Popularity:

Many popular brands like Facebook, Skype, Instagram, Pinterest, Uber, Salesforce are using React Native. While other brands like Pacifica, Nationwide, MarketWatch, Sworkit are using Ionic to serve the purpose. The main reason why Ionic is famous because it uses web technologies that makes it easy for developers to learn and develop apps.

As usual, even if Flutter was released back in 2017, in no time, Flutter gained massive popularity in the app development market. So many brands like Alibaba, Google Ads, Hamilton Musical, Green tea, etc have already picked Flutter as their futuristic app development framework.

What We Think:

Thousands of hours have been spent in building Flutter by Google engineers before announcing the new stable build, Flutter 1.5 in May 2019. Also, Google's support for Flutter is quite impressive; there are many libraries & integrations are ready to use that will help you to save your time and efforts if you pick Flutter for your next app development project. Moreover, using Flutter which is completely open-source language, it will help you to create beautiful layouts, boost app performance & serve incredible user experience to your users in a cost-effective manner by fulfilling all your business needs.

It denotes that Flutter has many advantages compared to its risks like...

• Enhanced performance
• Also, have support for Windows development
• Integrations for both Android & Visual Studio
• Supports different Firebase APIs, inline video, ads, and charts
• Vital community support, accessible documentation, and contains lots of fixes.

Without a doubt, every platform has its own advantages, but using new technology like Flutter will help you to develop a future proof app by ensuring sustainable business growth. Because it is not easy to choose app development framework for your next project, we advise considering all important things like your budget, time, app size, platforms, and everything that you have planned for your app.

Let us know what you think about these different app development platform via comments below.