Still, Going Native Is Better Than React Native and Flutter
Having a single codebase is a great thing. But there are hidden side effects.
Cross-platform mobile frameworks solved the critical cross-platform development problem in many different ways. Initially, the Apache Cordova project (formerly PhoneGap) solved this problem by introducing webview-rendering. After that, the Ionic project created a native-like HTML/CSS widgets toolkit for Apache Cordova. Ionic motivated everyone to choose Angular as the frontend framework for developing cross-platform mobile apps. However, both frameworks are built based on native bridges for JavaScript to native communication vise versa. In other words, They created a generic JavaScript interface for native features and exposed native features to the webview.
Many developers created mobile applications with these kinds of webview-based frameworks. However, everybody realized that native GUI elements are in the heart of a user-friendly mobile application. The uprising of React Native and Flutter has happened. Both frameworks gave the freedom to go with a single codebase like Ionic by having truly native GUI elements. Let’s look at these two trending projects.
