React Native or Flutter: Which of the two mainstream cross-platform development frameworks to choose?

Since the pandemic, the demand for mobile apps is growing at a rapid pace. And building apps for both iOS and Android is every business’s desire. Cross-platform development allows us to reach a broader audience faster. and choosing the right framework for your future application determines its productivity and its set of features. When it comes to fierce competition among the frameworks in the mobile application development market, nothing can beat React Native and Flutter. 42% of developers choose React Native for building apps, while Flutter is chosen by 39% in 2020. Both help developers lessen the Time to Market in delivering the applications to clients and thereby improve productivity. Both these frameworks have a great portfolio, with the industry giants showing faith in their abilities. If you aren’t sure which of these frameworks is best for your app development project, you have landed on the right article. But before we compare these frameworks based on various aspects, let’s have a quick overview of both.

What is a Mobile Application Development Framework?

Mobile App Development Framework is a library that offers the required fundamental structure to create mobile applications for a specific environment. It includes tools and software, compilers, debugging tools, and programming interfaces, among other things. In short, it acts as a layout to support mobile app development. There are multiple advantages of Mobile App Development frameworks such as being cost-effective, efficient, and many more.

You don’t need to know any complicated computer languages to create an app. There are various app development frameworks for iOS and Android. All you require is a solid grasp of web-based programming languages Such as HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

What is React Native? – A Brief

Developed by Facebook in 2015, this open-source mobile application framework is a well-used, well-loved cross-platform app development technology that at present, is one of the most popular frameworks in the world. This JavaScript-based framework centres around the native deployment of business applications that are significantly viable with Android and iOS. React Native is written with the combination of XML-Esque markup and JavaScript which is also known as JSX.

The major appeal of React Native is that it enables quicker development and implementation. Reusable elements, interaction with third-party extensions, hot reloading, platform-specific code, component-based GUI creation for front-end apps, and one of the largest UI support communities in the world are further important characteristics of React Native. It also allows the development of an app using one codebase. Developers love the ease of its dozens of plug-and-play program modules.

Features of React Native –

• Exceptional performance
• Components that can be reused
• Compatibility with third-party extensions

Use cases of React Native –

• Easy-to-use cross-platform app development framework
• Quick prototype applications
• Applications with simplified UI can easily be created
• Applications that look nearly native with responsive UX using FlexBox
• Applications with reusable components
• Applications that are designed to run with synchronous APIs

What is Flutter? – A Brief

Flutter, developed by Google in 2017, is a reactive, open-source, cross-platform mobile development framework that uses the Dart programming language. Flutter is a cross-platform mobile app development framework that works on one code base to develop applications for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux and the web. With its speedy rendering and other benefits, it’s a contender to overtake React’s popularity, and soon. Flutter is a comprehensive and precise framework that contains widgets, a rendering engine, debugging and integrating APIs, and resources to assist developers in creating and deploying beautiful mobile applications. Flutter has been used by several well-known organizations, including Google and Alibaba.

No more compromises on speed, quality, or performance – Flutter helps to build beautiful apps within a single codebase. The rendering engine is designed predominantly in C++. It’s interesting to know that apps built using Flutter are more intuitive and easier to navigate. The matter is that with this framework, app developers can modify UX. This process requires changing the variable in the state. In React Native vs Flutter comparison, this point is extremely important.

Some of the major benefits of Flutter are mentioned below –

• Performance that is pretty similar to that of a native
• Flexible User interface (UI)
• Provides Strong Widget Support
• Offers Built-in Material Design
• More rapid development

Use cases of Flutter –

• MVP mobile applications
• Applications that operate with OS-level features
• Applications with advanced OS plugins with simple logic
• High-performance business apps with Skia rendering engine
• High-level professional widgets
• Applications with vast data integration can easily be reactivated with the framework

React Native vs Flutter: Comparison

Development

React Native is known for its fast development time and access to a few third-party UI libraries with ready-to-use components that allow saving time during the development. Also, it enables delivering new functionalities to supported platforms immediately, which also requires less time. It has a Hot reload feature which means that a developer can make instant changes and see the results immediately. React Native doesn’t offer as many widgets as Flutter, but it’s inclusive with adaptive components. To get started with React Native, you must begin by installing the create-react-native-app package with npm, using it to create a new React Native application. One cool thing about development with React Native is its Expo integration provision. Expo lets you run your code on your mobile device without wiring it up. Instead, you just need to scan a QR code that appears on the console.

The speed of development in Flutter is lower than in React Native. Flutter lacks the support of many text editors and IDEs, which adds more time to the development process. This framework has access to several third-party UI libraries with ready-to-use components. In Flutter, a developer can see all the changes instantly using its hot reload feature. A Flutter application’s main building block is a widget. Flutter comes with several ready-to-use widgets, most of which implement material design concepts. Unfortunately, Flutter’s widgets are not adaptive, so you have to make platform-specific adaptations manually. To start with flutter all you need to do is download the Flutter package, unzip it, and then create an environment variable pointing to a folder inside that unzipped folder. You might also need to download Android Studio and set up an emulator if you don’t want to use your phone.

Architecture

React Native framework uses the Flux architecture from Facebook, but it requires a JavaScript bridge to integrate. This inconvenient fact inherently makes app design go a little slower than Dart, and that’s a key difference between Flutter and React Native. Flux is created by Facebook, the Framework creators whereas Redux is considered the most popular option in the community. Both of the frameworks have unidirectional data flow and the application’s state can be stored in the central place known as Store.

These frameworks have unidirectional data flow and store the application’s state in one central place called Store. They also make your app components as stateless as possible. You can also use the Context API, a new React feature for state management.

In the Flutter community, there are quite a few famous architectures. You can make use of BLoC architecture which stands for business Logic Component. Google depicted the architecture in the DartConf2018, and it states that the business logic should be taken out of the presentation layer and placed in the business logic components. The BLoC pattern heavily relies on streams and RxDart (Reactive Dart). This architecture makes it easier for experienced as well as junior Flutter developers to create complex applications with small and simple components. Also, some other architectures are present in the Flutter and if you are comfortable using Redux or Flux, then you can use the defined patterns. There are some packages in Flutter, you can use that also to make it possible.

Flutter doesn’t require a bridge to communicate with native components. It has everything packed within itself, including frameworks like Cupertino and Material Design. Thanks to this Flutter advantage, apps are more stable and predictable on different platforms than React Native apps.

Performance

In React Native, the entire application isn’t compiled to C/C++ or a native language. Instead, the UI components are compiled to their native equivalents, with the JS running in a separate thread and communicating with native modules for any action needed through a bridge. Unfortunately, initializing Javascript and requiring the modules is the most draining task. There is some hope for React Native’s performance, though. Many optimization areas may increase performance like lazy requiring, lazy native modules loading, and incremental cache read.

Flutter’s application is compiled using the arm C/C++ library. This makes it closer to a machine language and gives a better native performance. Unlike React Native, it doesn’t have just the UI components compiled; instead, the whole thing is compiled. Flutter is written in Dart language, which allows compiling a code quicker than JavaScript. Moreover, thanks to this, Flutter displays animations at 60 fps as a standard. As a rule, all Flutter apps have a high performance by default. But even though it is faster, it is also a substantially bigger program with more native components. So, it’s a point that one must weigh before proceeding. Fortunately, this framework provides a wealth of documentation on how to reduce file size.

Documentation

React Native documentation is not so impressive. To get the kind of documentation most projects need, developers often end up going to third-party sources. It’s a major point against the framework when you compare Flutter and React Native on documentation. The official documentation of React Native covers popular topics and guides in cross-platform development with React Native. The topic covers how to install and make use of native modules or build platform-specific components.

Flutter has invested a great deal in its native documentation, which has answers to all the questions. Perhaps the only drawback of Flutter documentation is that you need to visit a website each time you need to check something. But from another point of view, the documents are so well-structured on the website that the inconveniences are almost unnoticeable. Flutter documentation is available on open source at the docs.flutter.dev website. It offers detailed guides accompanied by graphics and video tutorials. The cool thing is that Flutter has several tools to assist you in app development, including a debugger and Flutter inspector.

Community Support

When it comes to an open-source development framework, having a large community of contributors matters and React Native has that. Since the launch of React Native in 2015, its community has been growing, and the number of contributors to the framework on GitHub is proof of that. The popularity of React Native is tremendous among native application developers who know JavaScript very well as it uses this language to craft high-performing mobile apps. It’s not just a framework, it’s a tribe.

As for Flutter, its community of developers is smaller than React Native’s, but not for long. The community of developers using it is growing fast. According to Stack Overflow’s Developer’s Survey of 2019, in the most loved/wanted category, 75.4 per cent of people showed interest in the Flutter framework. When asked about React Native, 62.5% of developers showed interest. With the continued investment from Google Flutter will be a framework trend that will continue to grow.

Code Reusability

React Native will allow you to write code once and apply it to every platform. But compatibility on every type of mobile app platform isn’t always guaranteed, often requiring developers to load a different set of components that work. These modifications can increase the development time and even affect React Native app costs.

In Dart, Flutter’s codebase is a lot more reusable. Developers can simply define a single UI widget tree and then reuse the defined logic.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Code Maintainability

In React Native maintaining the code is a pain. When you fork the code to suit your application, it interferes with the framework’s logic thereby slowing down the development process. In addition to that, most of the native components might have a third-party library dependency. Often these libraries are outdated and cannot be maintained properly due to the issues that come along with them by default.

Compared to React Native, maintaining a Flutter application is easy. The simplicity of code helps developers spot issues, source external tools, and support third-party libraries. Furthermore, the stateful Hot Reloading feature immediately resolves the issues at hand. The time taken for releasing quality updates and making immediate changes in the application is considered to be better than the hot reloading capacity of React Native.

UI and Development API

React Native only provides UI rendering, relying on third-party libraries to access native modules. The result can often be a patchwork effect in the code. However, it’s important not to make too much of this, because React’s JavaScript development language does offer its own set of advantages. Thanks to the JavaScript bridge, React Native renders the native components for each platform. This feature allows for creating the look and feel of native Android and iOS applications. The prominent advantage is that React Native has lots of ready-made components to use as building blocks. Sadly, there are drawbacks as well. For instance, it’s hard to replicate complex UI in a React Native app. Also, the React Native components can behave differently on different platforms.

Flutter comes with many UI rendering components, navigation, libraries, API access, and everything else to help developers develop great apps. The program’s many widgets also make it easier to nurture UI on Android and iOS devices.

Flutter has UI widgets packaged within itself, which means creating native-like applications is easy. No third-party apps or custom components are required. Besides, Flutter apps are consistent across all platforms.

Ease of Testing

React Native boasts of no official support for UI level testing and Integration testing. Furthermore, there are only a few unit-level testing frameworks available to test RN apps. No official support means developers have to rely on third-party tools like Appium and Detox and unearth bugs with their help.

Whereas, Flutter offers many integrated quality-control testing features. Not only does it offer a myriad number of testing features to test apps at the unit, widget, and integration level, but also boasts of detailed documentation related to it. And even better, it provides lots of detailed testing documentation.

Wrapping Up!

Flutter and React Native have many things in common. First and foremost, they are both open-source frameworks that anyone can use. They both are developed by leading companies: Google created Flutter vs React Native was created by Facebook. These frameworks are transforming the way the world would do business and advertise its products.

But both frameworks have strong and weak sides, but the idea is to fill the gap between the two platforms (Android and iOS). Some industry experts predict Flutter as the future of mobile app development. But, React Native takes the cake with some of the most impressive apps on today’s market, like Facebook and Instagram. All in all, the framework to choose will depend completely on the project’s parameters, and the business needs surrounding it.

If you are considering the development of mobile (or even web) apps for several platforms at once, we can help you. We at 3point3 Labs are doing an immaculate job in serving the best in class app development services with the latest frameworks and technologies. Our developers are talented and experienced enough to help build your dream applications or assist the main team with particular features with the best result at the client’s end. Connect with us today at [email protected], discuss your ideas and let’s get started.