Flutter or Android? Flutter or React Native?

Trying to clear confusion about android and flutter.

Published in

The Startup

4 min readNov 21, 2019

Android is a Linux based operating system designed primarily for smart mobile and communication devices. It was developed by a number of active developers known as the Open Handset Alliance, with the head developer, contributor, and commercial marketer being google. While flutter is an open-source UI software development kit created by Google. It is used for developing applications for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, Google Fuchsia and another web.

Android and flutter, both are actively developed by Google. One parent company is managing both the native and open-source, multi-platform for Android apps Flutter project began itself at Google and the first-ever Flutter SDK was released in 2017 which created a buzz and heavily promoted.

Due to the growing popularity of mobile apps, almost every company needs a mobile application to be competitive in the market. Both native android and flutter help developers to build cross-platform apps with ease by using a single programming language. Without any doubt, native Android apps developed with Android Studio have better features and are slick than apps developed with cross-platform. They can be easily detected because of fewer features but with the launch of Flutter apps, it’s a hard game to determine that the app was built with Flutter. application Developed with flutter is so slick and smooth like native applications. It would be extremely interesting if we compare native Android development with Flutter app development and to determine what would be the future of Android with the rise of Flutter.

Technical Architecture

it’s essential to consider the technical architecture of cross-platform for mobile app development. With knowledge of the internals of the framework, we can make an informed decision and choose the one which suits our project. Though both android and flutter are developed by Google, tech stack for both platforms are entirely different. Flutter uses Dart as the programming language, while Android architecture heavily relies on Java or Kotlin. it is known that apps developed with Java/Kotlin are smooth and fast as every module is constructed natively. Flutter uses the Dart framework and usually does not require the extension for communicating native modules and it has most of the components inbuilt so it’s bigger in size. To put its plane, in short, Flutter has everything needed for app development in the Flutter engine itself.

Installation

The installation method requires to be straightforward so it can be easily learned by developers. For Android installation the developers need to use Android Studio, native build and platform tools provided itself by Android Studio. Android Studio has all the SDK tools embedded within the IDE. Every time a developer makes changes within the app, it needs to rebuild or requires a third-party interference in order to see the changes. This might be a slow process as Gradle builds can take time. Gradle deals with Dependency management for Android apps.

In Flutter, when a developer makes any kind of change, it appears in the emulator immediately. However, as the application grows the developer requires to adopt new techniques to utilize this feature effectively. Dart is a new programming language and usually, it lacks supports in many IDEs and text editors.

UI Component and APIs

Front-end developers spend a lot of time on building the UI. It’s really important for a framework too has an API for accessing native modules with ease. Built-in UI components presented by android for constructing UI are very good and well coded. Unlike android Flutter apps run on its rendering engine and its framework. Flutter works on the idea of widgets which can be used to construct complex UIs. In flutter, There are many widgets available to build complex UIs that support both Material Components for Android and Cupertino for iOS. The Flutter layout and widgets are pixel perfect.

Testing Support

The best way to get code feedback is by writing. Android has great documentation and a rich set of testing features. applications can be tested easily from the Android studio itself or by using Gradle. There are so many Java and Kotlin frameworks available for lower-level testing UI testing.

On the other side, Flutter provides rich and solid testing features to test applications at the unit, widget and integration level. Flutter has cool documentation on testing Flutter. It has another widget testing feature where you can run widget tests for testing UI and for running them at the run speed of real devices.

Is Flutter Going To Kick React Native?

No platform is perfect and all of them lack one feature or another which can be a deal-breaker but you should consider above-done comparison before you analyze anything.

Both React Native and Flutter have their pros and cons, but Flutter is coming out as a winner in this match. It might become the first choice for developing Android apps it seems to be different from other cross-platform. Apps developed on this platform look native, smooth and slick just like the native android apps. In upcoming years, it is estimated that Cross-platform development will reach its height. Being an Android developer, you can’t ignore Flutter. Some experts have already predicted that Flutter might replace the future of mobile app development. Flutter has entered the cross-platform app development race very strongly and it’s here for the long run.

We’ll make no further predictions or guesses here, but it could be the warning for native mobile app developers that Flutter might affect their role in the future. Consider it or not but you can’t ignore Flutter anymore.