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“A comprehensive study of Flutter vs React Native for next cross-platform application development project in 2023.”
Considering the current mobile market, Android and iOS are the two popular platforms winning the stage. Any business looking for business expansion is seeking mobile app development for both of them. Gone are the days when developers need to exploit Android and iOS SDK separately to build applications. The cross-platform programming language is the new approach where a single codebase can work for both Android and iOS devices. That means developers need to code less, applications can be released faster and on a lower budget.
In this article, I shall perform a features review of two dominating cross-platform technologies, i.e., Flutter and React Native. Additively, there will be a comparative analysis of two which will help you to choose the best technology in 2023.
Let’s start with the current market shares of Flutter and React Native:
Popularity
Source: Statista
As depicted in the graph, the market trend of React Native is higher than Flutter, accounting for 42% and 39%, for 2020. However, the growth rate of Flutter is higher than the former one.
The market trend of Flutter has grown by 9% from 2019 to 2020 whereas it stays the same for React Native stays, with a zero percent rise.
React Native, written in JavaScript, is an old player in bringing modern web techniques to mobile platforms. It was released in 2015 and has experienced impressive growth since then. A vast range of industries is receiving a wide application of React Native framework. On Stack Overflow and Github, React Native is one of the fastest-growing communities.
The developers can easily connect with different groups of React Native developers on social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and others. With so many followers out there, we have numerous readily available plugins and solutions to develop apps (without any hassle). React Native is developed by SM giant, i.e., Facebook. Therefore, you can enjoy a big community of its own development team, assisting us from time-to-time.
Each year, React Native comes up with version updates to fix its performance at the developer’s end, especially for cross-platform applications.
To date, React Native has been successfully implemented in several applications. Below, I have created a list of app categories where developers can leverage React Native architecture for higher performance.
In contrast, to React Native, Flutter is a new but promising platform. Specifically, Flutter is known for its support of cross-platform app development. Since its inception in 2017, Flutter has grabbed the attention of multiple large companies that have apps already running in the market. Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit to build captivating, natively compiled apps for web, mobile, and desktop via a single codebase.
To write Flutter, Google has introduced ‘Dart’ in combination with C and C++. This exclusive UI kit is often exploited by developers to develop fast and scalable applications for numerous operating systems including iOS, Android, Google, and Linux. However, there is one biggest challenge of learning a new language, i.e., Dart. Although it is not complex, developers need to learn and implement multiple new things.
If you’re a developer and are looking for some helpful tips to use Flutter in your next project, you must read our guide on how to use Flutter in an effective way.
Flutter is a quite powerful technology, which holds numerous practical implementations in real-time applications. To name a few, I’ve mentioned in the pointers below:
The installation is the foremost step in every app development process. It should always be straightforward without any complications, so the developers can learn and get started with it easily.
Flutter offers an impressive SDK (software development kit), which some developers may find hard to install. Because they need to download the binary from Github. If we are developing an app for macOS, we can add ‘flutter.zip’ file as a PATH variable. The same can be done with the following command line:
curl -O https://storage.googleapis.com/flutter_infra/releases/beta/macos/flutter_macos_v0.7.3-beta.zip
unzip flutter_macos_v0.7.3-beta.zip
export PATH=[PATH_TO_FLUTTER__DIRECTORY]/flutter/bin:$PATH
Unlike Flutter, React Native offers a simplified installation process by offering package managers that cut down the need for additional steps to fetch and add files in a project. Learn more about that in the following content.
To install React Native, developers need to use NPM (Node Package Manager). The developers with JavaScript knowledge might find the installation process easy and simple, whereas others may find it a bit difficult as they would require to get familiar with the node package manager. NPM holds the capacity to install the packages both locally and globally.
The only exception here is when developers are installing React Native on macOS. The developers need to use the ‘HomeBrew’ package manager. The following command line is helpful in the same:
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
brew install node
brew install watchman
npm install -g react-native-cli
From this command line, developers can access React Native.
NOTE - Just like React Native, Flutter needs to provide some sort of package manager such as YUM, MacPorts, etc. to enhance its installation method.
Flutter uses Dart programming language. It is developed and owned by Google, a client-optimized language for apps on multiple platforms such as a server, mobile, web, desktop applications. It is a class-based, object-oriented language with C-style syntax. The developers can use it to compile either JavaScript or native code. Dart is quite a safe and expressive language to get started with.
On the contrary, React Native is a more familiarized technology as it harnesses the power of JavaScript. And, most of the developers are familiarized with JS. Because of this reason RN (React Native) is the most preferred cross-platform application development language in the market, till now. Moreover, JS is considered a default language for almost every browser, making React Native a winner out of React native vs Flutter.
As Flutter is written in Google’s in-house programming language, i.e., Dart. It is hard for developers to learn Flutter as they have no basic knowledge of its core language. It will take time to learn Flutter. So, we can say that Flutter gives a hard learning curve to the developers. However, creating cross-platform apps with Flutter is fast, safe, and effective in every way.
Since React Native is written in JavaScript, therefore, it provides a simple and easy learning curve. A large number of developers are already using JavaScript in one or another form. JavaScript has been around for many years, so it requires no additional learning efforts.
As Dart Supports Flutter, so it is easy to customize the UI layout of the application. Its built-in UI widgets eradicate the need for third-party libraries. The developers can easily create reusable structures, platforms, and widgets. Besides, the consistency is not at all sacrificed across all platforms.
Due to JavaScript intervention, the developers can render the native components for each platform. Which facilitates a native app-like look and feel for both iOS and Android platforms. Plus, React Native offers numerous ready-made components for block building.
When it comes to security Flutter development team takes it seriously. There are minimal security loopholes that can be eliminated by following the best practices such as
Just like Flutter, React Native offers the best security practices to comply with the regulatory authorities globally. However, the probability of a software’s failure or its exposure to security breaches turns higher when not supported by the developer’s efforts to protect against hackers.
Storing sensitive information wisely, performing authentication and deep linking, OAuth and Redirects, SSL Pinning, etc. are some of the recommended security practices as per React Native’s official docs.
Flutter allows you to use a single codebase to work for multiple platforms (iOS and Android). To support cross-platform app development effectively, Flutter provides its own UI components which enhance the flexibility of customizing applications, without requiring 3rd party libraries.
Undoubtedly, React Native has maintained its preference amongst developers as the leading cross-platform application development platform. The developers can utilize the Native elements for UI updates only. If they wish to enforce cross-platform capabilities, they need to rely on external third-party libraries.
If we talk about the cost of development, both are winners of the war named Flutter vs React Native, as they cost almost the same. Moreover, the reachability of an application depends on the framework and its UI components’ exploitation at the time of development.
With its rich widgets collection, Flutter applications are great in look and feel. As mentioned earlier in this article, Flutter cross platform application development is rapidly growing every year. Also, it is well-supported by its team of developers via excellent documentation and verbal communication.
It has been 5+ years since React Native is serving the market. Multiple prominent and successful brands are using this platform to develop and launch their apps on different platforms. Some core reasons behind its popularity include vast and mature community, easy-to-learn, plenty of libraries and tutorials for quick deployment, code reusability for both desktop and web applications.
To start with, Dart language is the major USP of Flutter platform. Apparently, it is newer in comparison to JS. However, it is a modern programming language that is a way faster than JavaScript. Dart also supports both strong and loose prototyping so it is more type-safe than JavaScript.
Apart from programming language, built-in UI rendering components, stateful management & loads of libraries, device API access, and other development APIs cut down the need of third-party libraries.
Last but not least, Flutter offers a great range of testing features at Unit, Widget, and Integration stage, accompanied by thorough testing documentation.
As we all know, React Native is written in JavaScript, an old programming language in the market supporting multiple apps and browsers. There is a great percentage of developers who’ve already worked with JS, it is a competitive advantage of RN over Flutter.
Moving ahead, React Native supports third-party libraries. It is always an added advantage to any framework that capacitates 3rd party integrations. Although RN lacks in built-in UI components and other features, there is room for great customization.
Last but not least, The installation process of React Native is easy and simple. The developers get NPM or Node Package Manager for installation, which is helpful especially for newbies. Learning and writing NPM commands to fetch binary is not that difficult for the app developers.
Flutter & React Native is an in-depth examination of the two leading cross-platform mobile app development frameworks, Flutter and React Native. The web blog explores how these frameworks might evolve in the future, taking into account aspects like technology improvements, developer preferences, market trends, and the continual enhancement of user experiences. It looks at how these platforms might affect the future of app creation, highlighting their unique strengths, problems, and potential trajectories in the quickly changing field of mobile app development.
In the ongoing debate of "Flutter vs React Native: Which One is Better in 2023?" the answer remains nuanced and largely dependent on specific project requirements and developer preferences. Both Flutter and React Native have continued to evolve and address their respective strengths and weaknesses. Flutter, known for its expressive UI capabilities and firm performance, has likely further enhanced its position as a top choice for visually appealing and fast applications. On the other hand, React Native's mature ecosystem and its familiarity with developers might still make it a reliable option for projects where time-to-market and developer efficiency are crucial.
