The past few years ushered us into the era of mobile applications, where mobile apps have become an integral part of our everyday life. Be it Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, Uber, Skype, or more mobile applications are trending excessively in this day and age. However, with this increasing dependency on mobile applications, the need for niche technologies, frameworks, and platforms is also rapidly increasing, giving way to the advent of new frameworks and platforms that allow developers to create cross-platform apps that are suitable for all platforms. Moreover, these two frameworks are competing against each other to prove their worth, making Flutter Vs React Native the most trending topics of the year.
From simplifying the app development process to making them efficient, these frameworks are helping redress-platform mobile applications that work seamlessly across various platforms and devices.
So, let's try to determine, 'What is the difference between Flutter and React Native?' and answer the important question, 'Will Flutter replace React Native?'. But before we delve deep into this discussion on React Native vs Flutter, it is important that we understand the need for cross-platform development frameworks.
Nowadays, Android and iOS are two of the most widely used mobile platforms, with a completely different application development process. Android requires developers with extensive knowledge of Java or Kotlin, whereas iOS needs developers well versed in Swift programming language, making the development process expensive and time-consuming.
Cross-platform app development came into the inception to overcome this drawback and has become the need of the hour. Industries are using frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, PhoneGap, and more, to create cross-platform applications, as they enable a single team to create apps with a single code base that works on multiple operating systems (OS), like iOS and Android. Due to this, most of the applications developed today are either cross-platform or hybrid and can run seamlessly on iOS and Android. Other advantages offered by cross-platform mobile application development frameworks are:
Now that we know the reason for the shift from native app development to cross-platform and hybrid app development, let's compare the two important cross-platform mobile app development technology.
Launched by Facebook in 2015, React Native is an open-source JavaScript framework built upon the React library and used to build natively rendering, mobile applications for iOS and Android. One of the most reliable and popular JavaScript frameworks used for developing mobile apps, React Native combines native components with React, the best-in-class JavaScript library for building the User Interface (UI). React Native enables developers to create react native apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux, though the latter two require dependency managers like HomeBrew package manager.
Used by Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb, Skype, Tesla, Walmart, etc. and backed up by a huge developer community, React Native popularity is tremendous due to its ability to build applications efficiently, in less time as well as its use of Node Package Manager (NPM) for installation, excellent UI rendering, GPU oriented application development, seamless integration and quick load time, etc. Additionally, its features like platform-specific code and hot reload make it a common choice for developers for mobile application development.
Flutter, one of the biggest React Native competitors, is a free and open-source mobile UI framework created by Google and released in 2017. Though new to the spectrum of mobile application development, it is gaining popularity and momentum among web and mobile developers for creating native applications, with a single codebase. In short, with Flutter, developers can use one programming language and codebase to create two different apps for different platforms.
Unlike React Native, Flutter does not use JavaScript, but rather a less known programming language Dart, which was created by Google in 2011. Dart programming language is focused on front-end development and can be used to create applications for both web and mobile. Though most of the systems are implemented in Dart, the factor that differentiates Flutter from other mobile application SDK is that it has a thin layer of C++ or C. Moreover, it is supported on Android Studio, IntelliJ Idea & Visual studio code.
From being open-sourced, fast and free to offering excellent UI support and native-like experience, React Native and Flutter, two major competitors offering cross-platform solutions, share various similarities. However, there are certain aspects of these two frameworks that make one framework superior from the other, which will be highlighted in the following comparison:
React Native is currently ruling the spectrum of cross-platform mobile application development, however, there is no doubt that Flutter is working hard to prove its worth and is slowly taking over the future mobile application development, by making the development more streamlined, introduction of new features and functionalities, as well as by saving the developer time and effort. However, it is still too soon to answer to questions like 'Is Flutter better than React Native?', as Flutter is still climbing the ladder to achieve the popularity and reliability that React Native is currently enjoying.
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