Source: Facebook

Flutter vs React Native (Controversial)

tecHindustan
7 min readMay 25, 2018

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If you want to choose between Flutter or React Native according to your requirements. In this blog, you will know which one is better for you.

Source: tecHindustan

Let’s Start!

Cross-platform app development has been a unexciting task for any mobile app developer. When talking about hybrid mobile apps, in the hybrid app development we write the code once and it built apps for all of the platforms with the same code that runs smoothly without the need of any additional efforts. These all are possible with the help of a variety of frameworks which are available right now- this includes the much talked about frameworks like React Native from the social media giant Facebook and Flutter from the Google.

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React native is a js framework that is used to build native mobile apps. in this react framework is used and offers a huge amount of inbuilt APIs and components. With React native you don’t build a mobile web app, an HTML5 app, or a hybrid app; rather you are building a real mobile app that is indistinguishable from an app that is built using Objective-C or Java. Just like regular iOS and Android apps, React Native uses the same fundamental User Interface for building blocks. You just put these strong building blocks together using React & JavaScript.
Whereas, Flutter allows developers to build apps for both the iOS and Android at the same time with the use of exact same code. This may sound like a giant leap for Flutter but there is still a long way to go in catching up with React Native.

To discuss more about “Flutter vs React Native”. Let’s start with comparison between their Performance

Must Read:
Hybrid App vs Native App

Flutter vs React Native

Now lets compare based on Flutter vs React Native Performance. To figure out in which Flutter is better than React Native and vice versa!

Flutter vs React Native: Why Flutter is better

  • The Stateful Widget in Flutter that provides a place that helps to store and change data dynamically that would be similar to react and react native.
  • The recommended IDEs for Flutter app development include Android Studio and IntelliJ Idea. These are easy and awesome to work with for a developer who has already worked on Android.
  • Although React Native has Hot Reload, it is not as fast as Flutter.
  • With React Native the situation becomes difficult as it comes to the selection of navigator because of no navigator in React.

Native is 100% perfect. On the other hand, the built-in navigator in Flutter is amazing. You can easily create a new route without connecting anything. Dissimilar to React Native where you can import navigation components every time.

React Native vs Flutter: Why React Native is better.

  • Styles aren’t separated in Flutter, you would need to give inline styling while creating each component.
  • Flutter is known for Animation and UI customization, however, it is comparatively more difficult to implement animations in flutter than in React Native.
  • Flutter doesn’t have enough resources to fix things up as till date it hasn’t received much attention from StackOverflow. This makes it harder for the developers to quickly build applications.
  • Modularity in Flutter never exists. It is almost impossible to inherit one component into another in Flutter app development.

Tips to write better code:
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Flutter

UPDATE: Flutter is now in Beta 3. Here is the announcement.

The Flutter mobile app SDK is a new way to build fast, beautiful mobile apps and which will help developers to break away from “cookie cutter” apps that always have been so common in the past. If you have tries Flutter you would have really liked it just like other people.

As with any new system, people want to know what makes Flutter different, or put another way, “what‘s new and exciting about Flutter?” That is a fair question, and this article “Flutter vs React Native 2018” will try to answer it from a technical viewpoint — not just what is exciting, but why.

However, staffing team won’t be that easy as the platform is so new and Dart is a niche language, but it can easily be picked up by Kotlin and Java developers. Here, upskilling an existing mobile team would be better for Android Developers as Flutter can easily integrate with IntelliJ as well as Android Studio. The situation becomes problematic for iOS developers as they need to get used to tooling and the language; which could be a bit more difficult.

In Flutter app development, apart from the Bluetooth API and NFC payments, most of the hardware and sensor APIs are supported but some of them are at their initial stages of development. Still, a lot of plugins already exist, but some areas are more inflow than others. For example, inline video support and dynamic inline maps are still under development, but full screen and static maps are supported.

Conclusively, when it comes to testing, it becomes very clear that Flutter is a new framework. Dart offers an excellent unit testing that can be utilized and flutter offers you a great unit testing framework that can be utilized. It allows you to run performance tests with its flutter_driver package.

However, the focal point of today’s discussion is “Flutter vs React Native” making a very crucial comparison between these two frameworks that help in creating cross platform apps. The opponents are Google Flutter on one hand and React Native on the other.

React Native

The framework was released as an open source on GitHub in the year 2015 and is the most popular of the two frameworks on Google and Stack Overflow. Despite being a semi-matured framework, there is no clear roadmap, just a dedicated page on GitHub that lists placeholders. Staffing in React Native is comparatively easier but the React Native app developers aren’t an ordinary thing; finding native mobile app developers who have knowledge of React and JavaScript as well, could result in a tall order.

React Native supports the majority of Android and iOS native APIs. Due to its huge developer community, even if there is no official API available there are plenty of third-party APIs are available to choose one from. In terms of hardware specific APIs, React Native lacks a number of them; again, third-party libraries are also available. React Native doesn’t have impressive APIs for Bluetooth, NFC, camera, sensors, and more. The React Native app developers have all JavaScript frameworks that are available for testing at a unit level. However, when it comes to UI/automation testing the situation becomes quite complex.

Flutter vs Xamarin vs React Native, explain what they are, how they work, and performance comparison. I hope after reading this, you are inspired enough to go check them out and know enough to put together in your mind, according to your needs which technology could be the right choice for you.

Flutter vs Xamarin

Xamarin is a framework which is developed behind closed doors, which doesn’t receive much external input on code and is one of the front-running cross-platform app development framework. There are different benefits of Xamarin development like; cost-efficiency, reusable code base, access to native APIs among many others.

Let’s find reasons to choose Xamarin to discuss more on flutter vs Xamarin

  1. Xamarin build applications that renders exact native app experience just like platforms.
  2. You can use single code across iOS, Android, Windows or other platforms
  3. Not writing code for every platform means cost efficiency
  4. Many benefits of coding in C#

Ionic vs flutter vs react native is also a pert of flutter and react native comparison. We need to discuss many important frameworks so you can figure out which one is more suitable for you.

Flutter vs Ionic

Unlike other frameworks, Ionic follows a different approach. It is based on based on the HTML5 programming language. With Ionic, you still create a real native app but you do this by creating a web app (with HTML, JS and CSS) which will be wrapped by a real native app that hosts a webview (basically a hidden browser).

As you are going to build web page in the end, it is quite easy for web developers. There are a lot of tools that are provided by Iconic which makes mobile app development easier and it also bundles the app into shippable packages.

Let’s see Advantages of Ionic to discuss more on Flutter vs Ionic

  1. Platform independent
  2. Helps in creating default mobile app UI functionalities easily and efficiently.
  3. Works on iOS’s UIWebView or Android’s WebView.

Flutter vs Nativescript

NativeScript comes in different flavors — pure JavaScript/ TypeScript, with Angular and with Vue.js. Which gives us a variety of frameworks to work with. All options are under active development though, hence it’s best to simply dive into the docs.

Like Flutter and React Native, NativeScript also ships you a bunch of pre-built components which you use to compose user interfaces. It does not work with HTML but with its own components.

It’s time to discuss is nativescript good? To know more about Flutter vs Nativescript.

Nativescript is good. They have some really good comparison make on their website. It is faster than hybrid app and no issue on growing the app. Learning curve is average. Nativescript enable you access the native APIs from the underlying platform.

As in this “Flutter vs React Native” we have discussed a lot about Flutter and React Native. Compared them on the basis of their performances now lets have a look on Flutter’s Future.

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Other than Flutter vs React Native 2018, we have written many blogs related to technology, self improvement and many more here

Future of Flutter

Flutter would be better if they bring up a separate place for styling and a construct for reusing code. Until then you can try solving the issues open over GitHub.

Originally Posted on: Flutter vs React Native -tecHindustan

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tecHindustan

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