React Native Vs Flutter: What Is Better For Your Business

The creation of mobile applications has reached an all-time high. We have new applications every hour of every day. Additionally, there is also the integration of multiple platforms into the ecosystem of technology that runs our lives.

The biggest challenge that most companies face during the deployment of applications across different platforms is the fact for each platform a different code has to be written from scratch. This does not work well while trying to maintain consistency across the various platforms.

The solutions to this have been making an appearance recently but there is one in particular that we will be talking about today.

The solution is to create compiled applications, these are frameworks that give the closest performance as that of native applications.

The most visible contenders in this list are Google's Flutter and Facebook's React Native.

Let's take a deep dive into what these frameworks are, what they are capable of and if they are worth investing time and money on instead of continuing with native application development.

Flutter

This is an open-source cross-platform mobile development framework that is largely credited to Google. After going through multiple iterations a stable version was finally released in July 2019.

Unlike most cross-platform languages that are built with javascript, Flutter has the distinction of using dart - a C-style language that is object-oriented and developed by Google as well.

React Native

The second contender is Facebook's React Native. It was first developed in house and then later open-sourced in 2015. It uses the popular Javascript library namely Javascript and React.js

Today we will be comparing them on the following parameters

• Language
• Support
• Corporate Support
• Performance
• Adoption
• User Interface
• Stability

Language

Uses a new language called Dart. It is easy to learn and adopt but is not as widely used as javascript. If you know C++ or java you will be able to learn it with relative ease. There is a learning curve but it is not impossible to learn.

Javascript is one of the most widely used programming languages in the world. React native is written entirely in Javascript, making it much easier to get developers.

Support

It does not have a large community for support as it is relatively new. But the pace at with it is being adopted is rapid. Some of the larger companies have already begun to use it partially or completely for app development.

Since it has been around for 4 years, it has a bigger community, however, adoption has been slow and gradual

Corporate Support

The new kid on the block is backed by Google. Even though it is an open-source, Google is determined to make flutter the best solution for cross-platform development.

React Native is Facebook's venture. It was first developed in house and then was open-sourced. Since it did come from Facebook, there is a dedicated team of engineers working on it day and night. This has given it the badge of trust in development circles

Performance

It is commonly believed that flutter performs better as Dart code is compiled to native machine code, hence getting access to native components without an intermediary.

To interact with native components React Native has to have a JavaScript Bridge. This hinders the performance of the application when it interacts with the Native Components.

Adoption

If you have Google as your backer you are bound to grab attention. Since it is new there aren't too many applications out there in the app store that have used flutter, but again it's been less than a year.

I have seen product development cycles longer than that.

In the past four years that it has been around react-native has had quite a run. Considering the popularity of JavaScript, developers have been quick to jump on the React Native freight train.

User Interface

This works with proprietary widgets sets that give the best-customized UI design that has the potential to provide dynamism and native support. But, at this point is lacking in a few components and thus does not have the desired effects.

This works with the native components and thus has a more dynamic framework that is great for enhancing the user experience

Stability

Flutter has finally got a stable version out this year and it has some great features for developers but is still snuggling to make a mark in a slightly crowded industry.

Considering that React Native has a vibrant community backing it and has been consistently performing since its arrival, it is considered to be the more stable of the two.

This is an extremely interesting time to be in the programming industry. People have finally started moving away from native programming. This has created space for newer technologies to come in and contribute to the vast ecosystem of programming

What you end up choosing to create your application clearly depends on what you are comfortable with and what kind of application you want to end up with.