With the increase in smartphone users globally, mobile application development has taken a steep increase than ever before. For the tech industries, developing mobile applications is always the fundamental pillar of any company. But creating an application for different platforms with the same accuracy, functionality and versatility has always been an issue for them. Apart from maintaining two teams- iOS and Android, there’s always a loophole between both applications due to two different teams. This issue encouraged the idea to create cross-platform application development and in this race, Flutter and React Native are the two major market players.

Now the question which arises here is what to choose? What is better: react native or flutter? 

To answer these questions, let’s have an inside look at both.

 

What is Flutter and React Native?

Google’s Flutter and Facebook’s React Native are the two-trending cross-platform mobile app development technologies. 

Flutter is a project introduced by Google and its alpha version was released in May 2017. It’s a UI development toolkit to develop natively compiled mobile, web and desktop applications from a single codebase.

On the contrary, React Native is a project introduced internally by Facebook and open-sourced in 2015. It’s a framework to build cross-platform mobile applications using React.

React Native is already a mature and renowned player in the race whereas Flutter is much younger and new in the market.

Let’s have a quick look at the differences between Flutter and React Native on given parameters:

Difference between Flutter v/s React Native

 

Technical architecture

The technical architecture is one of the most essential parts in application development especially when it’s cross-platform. The in-depth knowledge of the framework will help to choose the best technology for the project.

 

• Flutter- Skia

Flutter uses Dart framework which supports most of the inbuilt components, so it doesn’t need any bridge unlike React Native to communicate to the native modules.

• React Native- Flux

React Native uses Flux which relies heavily on the architecture of the JavaScript runtime environment, popularly known as the JavaScript Bridge. So, at runtime, we must compile the JS code into the native code.

 

Analysis

Flutter Engine contains most of its native components inbuilt in the framework while React Native needs the JavaScript bridge which makes its performance poor. So, clearly Flutter wins here.

 

Programming language

The major benefit of cross-platform applications is the use of a single programming language for two different platforms viz iOS and Android.

 

• Flutter- Dart

Flutter uses the Dart programming language which is quite easy to understand as it is backed by most of the OOPs concepts. But it is still rarely used by the developers.

• React Native- JavaScript

React Native uses the JavaScript language. It is one of the most renowned languages in the Web Community currently. So, even with little training, we can easily adopt React Native to build cross-platform applications.

 

Analysis

Most of the Web developers use JavaScript which makes adapting React Native easy. Dart too has great features but it’s rarely known to the developers. Considering this,

React Native takes the crown in this segment.

 

Project Configuration and Setup

Setting up the development environment and configuring the project is one of the most tedious tasks before developing the application. So, the user needs proper documentation to complete all these works prior to development.

 

• Flutter

Since Flutter is a project of Google, we can easily find a detailed information guide for platforms and IDE setup for both Android and iOS.

• React Native

The React Native’s getting started guide assumes that developers have all the required knowledge of setup to develop iOS and Android applications. So, we can find little to no information about setup for iOS and Android projects in React Native documents.

 

Analysis

From the above comparison, we can see that Flutter has better documentation for setup and configuration.

 

UI components

For cross-platform mobile apps, support of native components is vital. Hence, it becomes very important for our framework to access native modules easily.

 

• Flutter- Rich in Components

Flutter is packed with device API access, UI rendering, testing and lots of libraries. It also has many widgets for Cupertino which helps to render UI on both Android and iOS platforms.

• React Native- Less Components

React Native’s core framework supports UI rendering only so it relies mostly on third-party libraries.

 

Analysis

Flutter is loaded with UI components and development APIs whereas React Native is highly dependent on third-party libraries. So, Flutter is stronger here.

 

Community support

When developers adopt any technology, they soon form a community where they share their knowledge. A good community helps to learn and solve problems efficiently.

 

• Flutter

Flutter being the new in the race, it has attained a lot of attention. The Flutter community is rapidly growing these days, but developers still face problems to get enough resources to solve very common issues too.

• React Native

As React Native was launched earlier than Flutter, hence, it has developed more popularity than Flutter. We can find React Native communities on GitHub easily.

 

Analysis

Though the Flutter community is growing swiftly, the community of React Native is more popular and easily accessible. Thus, in this last comparison, React Native is better than Flutter.

 

Hiring Developers

Currently, hiring coders is notoriously tough. Salary levels in the tech industry are rising, and there is a scarcity of qualified candidates. It's hard pulling teeth to get talented developers who want to stay in the organisation.

 

• Flutter

Flutter developers are pretty dedicated and skilled; this is not meant to disparage the Flutter developer community. Organisations don't need to go through a lot of hoops to hire flutter developers since there aren't many of them. Almost every recruit, though, will need training.

• React Native

On the other hand, React Native developers have a huge resource in the JavaScript community to draw upon. Although hiring is still challenging, there is a far broader reservoir of developers to choose from than there is for Flutter.

 

Analysis

Though there are many react app developers to choose from, you can be assured that anything you get from Flutter will be of high quality. It is determined by the needs and desires of the organisation. As a result, it’s a tie.

 

 

Final conclusion

It was a neck to neck crown fight but with my assessment, Flutter takes the crown. 

But is Flutter better than React Native? 

While both React Native and Flutter have their own pros and cons, some experts in the industry have predicted that Flutter will be the future of mobile app development. So, from the above comparison, it is predictable that Flutter will emerge as one of the strongest players in cross-platform mobile app development. Although React Native already has a stronger grip in the industry, we can trust and use any of the technologies according to the project requirement and each of them will surely spread its wings and fly.