Nowadays, product owners have two competitive cross-platform app development choices: Flutter and React Native. We can utilize both frameworks to develop cross-platform mobile and desktop applications with the help of a mobile apps development company. Both frameworks indeed look quite similar from the outside and in the available features. Hopefully, you have already read a lot of comparisons and reviews about Flutter and React Native.
Many product owners think that Flutter isn’t a suitable option for app development because it utilizes an unfamiliar programming technology, Dart. A programming technology is just an interface for your development team to interact with the framework.
How a framework resolves the cross-platform development issue is more critical than the popularity of a particular framework’s programming technology. This write-up will provide you with a thorough comparison of these two comprehensive app development platforms.
Table of Contents
Flutter Offers a Near-Native Performance
The performance is so undervalued because of powerful gadgets. However, users have gadgets with different sorts of specifications. Some users may try to run your app while running a lot of other apps in the background. Your app must work firmly in every condition. Therefore, performance is still a critical factor in modern cross-platform apps. No one can deny that an app built without any framework performs better than React Native and Flutter applications. But we often have to pick up a cross-platform app framework for rapid feature delivery.
A usual React Native app comprises two separate modules: JavaScript engine and native User Interface. React Native renders native platform-specific User Interface elements based on React state modifications. On the other hand, it utilizes a JS engine to run the app’s JS. Every native-to-JavaScript and JavaScript-to-native call goes through a JavaScript bridge, quite similar to the design of Apache Cordova. React Native bundles your app with a JS engine at the end.
Flutter applications do not have any JS runtimes, and Flutter utilizes binary messaging channels to create a bidirectional communication stream between native code and Dart. Flutter provides you with near-native performance for calling the entire native code from Dart because of Dart’s ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation process and this binary messaging protocol. React Native applications may perform with low efficiency when there are above-average native calls.
Flutter’s Productive Layout System
React Native comprises a FlexBox concept-based layout system built with the Yoga layout engine. The layout syntax of React Native is quite similar to CSS FlexBox syntaxes. Nowadays, every web developer and UI designer is familiar with CSS FlexBox styling. Your development team may struggle with the extensive CSS styles, and your team’s UI developers would have to fix CSS. Therefore, if you utilize React Native to build your next application, you have to hire a reliable mobile application development company to become familiar with CSS FlexBox syntax.
Flutter comprises a widget tree-based layout system. In simple words, Most Flutter developers typically describe widgets in a render-tree-like data structure by overriding the development method. They are able to imagine how widgets will render on the entire screen.
FlexBox experience for existing developers or additional UI developers is not required if you have selected Flutter.
You can enhance the feature development speed of your cross-platform application thanks to the tree-based layout system of Flutter. When the app layout becomes complicated, your development team can group widgets into various sections by assigning them to different Dart variables.
Flutter Apps Have a Consistent UI
React Native is beneficial in rendering platform-specific UI elements. For example, your app renders native iOS User Interface elements if you launch your app on an iPhone, iPad, etc. Each platform describes unique design concepts for its User Interface elements. Some platforms comprise UI elements that others don’t. Therefore, even a straightforward UI modification requires professional testing on various platforms if you utilize React Native. Also, you can’t overcome the various limitations of platform-specific User Interface elements.
Flutter SDK has its own User Interface toolkit. Therefore, your Flutter application looks the same on various operating systems. Unlike platform-specific UI elements of React Native, the Flutter development benefits you with the latest features for UI elements. Thanks to flutter-theming, you are able to change your application’s theme based on the end user’s settings on a specific operating system.
Almost every modern app shows its brand from the application’s design concepts. Flutter motivates to develop consistent and intuitive user experience across all supported operating systems using a consistent GUI layer.
Flutter’s Official Support for All Popular Platforms
React Native provides official support for only iOS and Android platforms. However, there are various forks of React Native that offer compatibility for desktop platforms. For example, Proton Native produces Qt and wxWidgets-based cross-platform desktop apps from React Native codebases. But Proton Native isn’t actively maintained now, and Valence Native is their active fork.
If you want to create a desktop app for your existing React Native application, various options are available. Also, Microsoft helps in maintaining two different React Native forks: react-native-macOS and react-native-windows. Popular React Native libraries do not support all these forks. Also, there is no feature-rich React Native fork for Linux yet.
Flutter officially supports iOS, Android, Linux, macOS, Windows, Web, and Fuchsia. Every supported Operating system utilizes the same rendering backend, Skia. Therefore, almost every popular Flutter plugin will work on all supported platforms. Flutter effectively motivates all plugin developers to add implementations for various platforms by offering compromised documentation and a high-performance Dart-to-Native binary communication mechanism.
Conclusion
The Flutter project is two years younger than the React project. Still, it offers more benefits to product owners. Flutter’s new and growing community doesn’t use Angular, and Dart wasn’t a quite famous general-purpose programming technology earlier, like JavaScript. We still can’t compare Flutter’s features with various other mature cross-platform frameworks.
Both frameworks operate on top of a native host app. React Native can’t improve its performance the same as Flutter because of its JS runtime-based architecture. That’s why it would be a better decision for you to hire a reliable mobile apps development company and build apps with Flutter.
