Are you looking for a fast and cost-effective solution for your business to remain competitive in the market? Then Cross-platform solutions are gaining popularity. Flutter Vs React Native is the two leading market players. In the past few years, there has been a growing popularity of mobile applications, where mobile apps have become an integral part of our everyday life. Be it Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, Uber, Skype, etc. mobile applications are trending day in and day out. This increasing dependency on mobile applications, give rise to the need for new technologies, frameworks, and platforms. It simplifies the app development by reducing the complex process to make them efficient

The ultimate aim of any mobile app development company is to choose a cross-platform framework that should enable developers to write a single codebase to build apps for both iOS and Android faster using a single language and deploy it across multiple platforms, thus saving time and money. It will help customers to choose the right framework that might best support them to achieve their goals.

Which Is Better Flutter Vs React Native?

Flutter is a mobile app SDK built by Google that allows us to create, high performance, high fidelity, and extremely fast applications that can run on multiple platforms like Android and iOS. Flutter is powerful as it has a thin layer of C/C++ code but most of its systems are implemented in Dart (A general-purpose programming language originally developed by Google). The developers can easily approach read, replace or remove. This gives developers tremendous control over the system.

React Native an open-source framework backed by Facebook, released on GitHub that involves the way for combining both iOS and Android platform’s native APIs. It is written in JavaScript.

1. The language Stack

Flutter is an open-source mobile application framework that works on a completely different programming language called Dart. Developers use Dart to create high-quality, mission-critical apps for iOS, Android, and the web. It is a great fit for both mobile and web apps for client-side development. Dart is based on c/c++, java and supports things like abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism. With Dart Bridge, the bigger size application works much faster. Unlike React Native with JavaScript bridge. Whereas React Native lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript. It assembles dynamic JavaScript code to native view at runtime. The rest of the code runs in the additional virtual machine that is packaged inside the app itself. Flutter vs react native usage of the JavaScript bridge to communicate with native modules

2. Architecture

React Native vs native app architecture is known as Flux. Facebook uses flux to develop client-side web applications. Each framework mostly follows the MVC framework. The unidirectional data flow is the main concept of Flux. Flux takes care of the Model in the MVC and reacts takes care of the view part.

Flutter

A Dart app architecture library with uni-directional data flow inclined by RefluxJS and Facebook’s Flux. Flutter-flux implements a uni-directional data flow pattern comprised of actions, stores, and store watchers. It is based on flux but modified to use flutter instead of React. Flutter Flux implements a unidirectional data flow pattern that consists of Actions, stores, and store watchers.

3. Flutter vs react native performance

React Native script you need a bridge to call Swift, Android, or Windows & Mac APIs with Flutter its dart so you don’t need that everything potentially would be native. This also solves the problem with the JS Ecosystem split between many different versions like Common JS, AMD. React Native developers face problems developing hybrid apps, but for native apps, you won’t face any performance-related issues. It offers seamless performance in all standard cases and it is highly reliable. Flutter vs react native app size doesn’t really matter as the memory issue is being solved while developing extensive apps an MB or 2 doesn’t make much because the libraries are heavy.

Flutter takes the crown over react native, when comparing both Facebook’s Flutter vs react native performance. It has the advantage of Dart and there is no JavaScript bridge for initiating interactions with the device native components, the speed of development and running time gets accelerate drastically. Flutter has set the animation standard at 60fps is evidence of its high performance. Lastly, as Flutter is compiled into the native ARM code for both Android and iOS, performance is the one issue that it would never face.

4. User Interface (UI/UX)

React Native app development requires to use of third-party libraries since React Native does not have a UI components library of its own. We used native base components, which is an open-source UI components library. React Native Elements, Shoutem, and react native Material Design are other similar UI libraries that are available to the user. When comparing user Interfaces between React Native vs Flutter, React Native is similar to using HTML without any CSS framework. It is based more on the native components both for Android and iOS also better User Experience when a user taps into the operating system.

Flutter’s Flat App does not have a UI components library of its own like React Native, it uses third-party libraries and components like Native Base, which is an open-source library that develops a layer on top of React Native that provides you with the basic set of UI components. There are three main UI libraries, Shoutem UI Components, React Native Elements, Native Base components.

Flutter layout widgets are currently part of the application, new widgets can be included and existing ones can be modified to give them an alternate feel and look, the trend has now changed, the UIs have become more user-friendly, easy to use, increase user engagement, and win grants. Flutter accompanies built-in beautiful material design and Cupertino like iOS-flavour widgets, rich motion APIs, smooth natural scrolling, and platform awareness. Flutter has its own UI components, material design; adaptable widget sets along with an engine to render them on Android as well as an iOS platform. Few examples of Flutter Widgets are drawer, Inkwell, Gesture detector, default tab controller.

5. Community Support

React Native is the most popular open-source framework on Stack Overflow it is backed by a huge community with 68K stars on GitHub, 14.5k user subreddit-9000 user discord chat, and strong support on Stack Overflow that is why it has more third party libraries/plugins than Flutter.

Flutter

The Flutter team can be found for support in a 4.5k user subreddit-30k stars on Github-740 users on Google Group and on Stack Overflow. When comparing the flutter vs react native benchmark, the flutter’s community is not as strong as the one for React Native. Support provided by the Flutter Team at Google is good. Their documentation is thorough enough to help you and they address the questions posted within a reasonable timeframe which helps to get started with flutter with app development.

6.Units Testing

React native developers have all JavaScript frameworks for testing at a unit level. And when it comes to UI and automation testing, the situation is not as bright. A number of third party libraries are available

Flutter is a new framework when it comes to testing a new framework it’s somehow difficult, but flutter uses Dart which provides an excellent unit testing framework, it offers you a great option for testing the widgets on a headless runtime, at unit test speeds.

7. Development Time

The web app development company works on a very strict deadline and if the frameworks deliver short development time then there are major possibilities that companies would opt for that framework. React native has many different third-party libraries, such as Calendar, Modal also has ready-to-use components, which improves flutter vs react native development speed for the app. In Flutter, we need to add separate files for both iOS and Android platforms. In each of these files, you need to add code that corresponds to the rules of the platform.

8. Hot Reload

Both Flutter and react-native support hot reloading which is blazing fast compared to how true native apps recompile in Android Studio and Xcode. If your app encounters an error, you can fix the error and then continue on as if the error never happened. Changes can be made to a Flutter app while it is running and it will reload the app’s code that has changed and let it continue from where you left off.

9. Configuration & Setup

Flutter’s setup process is much more straightforward than React Native. Flutter comes with the provision of automated check-ups of system problems, something which react-native communications miss to a great extent.

10. Stable for Development

Stability becomes an important factor to develop a cross-platform app. As Flutter is considerably new in the cross-platform industry, the numbers of businesses that have adopted the SDK for developing their cross-platform apps are very less. The Flutter Beta 3, offers improved developer tools and asset systems.

React Native display page of apps that have been developed using the framework is much higher. It was quite stable from earlier and it also enjoys the support of a large community of contributors.

React Native vs Flutter both have their own set of gains and losses, Flutter app development is still new in the market of the app development industry, and React Native made its formation way before to gain a good audience ground. Some industry experts realize the untapped potential with Flutter and predicted the future of mobile app development. So it is clear that Flutter has entered the cross-platform mobile development race very strongly.

Let’s talk, if you are in a dilemma with picking a mobile tool for development, always happy to help.