Flutter Vs. React Native: Which One to Choose?

The leading market players and development frameworks – Flutter and React Native have become top contenders competing to prove their worth across cross-platform mobile app development. People looking to develop apps more quickly in less cost are scratching their head as they find it extremely difficult in identifying which framework best fits their app idea.
Making this exercise a bit easy, in this article, we have covered the most crucial comparison points that will help you gain meaningful insights on choosing either.

What is Flutter and React Native? A Sneak Peek

Flutter is a mobile app SDK that allows you to write an app in one database and compile to both Android and iOS OR take it as a Google’s portable UI toolkit for building natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.
React is a Facebook’s JavaScript framework used for writing real, native mobile applications for iOS and Android.

Comparison Factors

A. Programming Language

React Native uses JavaScript as a programming language that is widely used by web developers which makes it easy to adopt. While Flutter uses Dart programming language that is seldom used and less popular in the developer community- through which we can easily conclude React takes the lead.

B. Technical Architecture

React Native uses JavaScript Bridge to communicate with the native modules and contrarily, flutter has all those native components needed for app development in the Flutter Engine or framework itself which makes its performance better than the former.

C. User Interface

Flutter apps look good across all OS versions because of their one codebase and component-rich nature that means the app will behave naturally and copy their native components whereas, Native’s application components looks just like the native ones. So if you want your app to look almost the same across platforms then you can use React.

D. Time to Market
React is, of course, faster in development but a bit less than flutter. Taking into account, it uses the bridge and native component which requires separate optimization for each platform that increases the time to develop.

E. When not to Choose
If your app design is platform-specific, requires multiple interactions with an OS, needs minimalist UI and is particular about phone hardware than flutter isn’t the framework you should go for. You should opt for native app development whereas, if your app requires custom communication via Bluetooth, have to handle some complicated task in the background and you’re looking to develop an Android-only app then for sure you should go for native app development. Since it is good for iOS app development.

F. Community Support
Since React was launched much earlier than Flutter, it has gained a significantly good amount of popularity but flutter is still nascent in its stage with a growing community.

G. Testing Support
The React Native community has no official support for UI level testing and integration; it uses third-party tools like Detox and Appium, whereas flutter has a rich set of testing features like widget testing which makes it much greater than React.

Conclusively, flutter is still naïve but is actively working to enhance its stability and there are many apps build with Flutter some of them being Xianyu app by Alibaba, Google Ads app, App for JD finance, Hamilton app, etc. And the popular apps build with React Native are Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Skype, Tesla, Wix, etc.

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