Whether you're interested in becoming a cross-platform app developer or you’re making the crucial choice of choosing the platform you want your next startup to work with, React Native and Flutter, have been creating a massive buzz lately while being placed against each other in the race to decide which framework is the best.
React Native (Facebook) and Flutter (Google) have been waging a battle for quite a while now, brought to light by two internet giants (FAANG-membered). A few years back, developers had to choose between developing Android or iOS apps, but today you can develop both Android and iOS apps using React Native or Flutter to halve your efforts.
Flutter and React Native have both seen various developments in recent news. In fact, on 23rd July 2020, React Native shared on Twitter that Facebook and Microsoft were putting considerable efforts into supporting React Native Windows and macOS. Additionally, earlier in July 2020, Facebook-backed React Native released its 0.63 version of the cross-platform UI framework with a new feature that helps tidy up wordy and poorly formatted error logs and with tweaks to help developers conform to Apple's new App Store rules for iPhone apps.
On the other hand, Google has also been putting in considerable efforts for the past few years into creating and expanding Flutter. Earlier in July 2020, Google announced its partnership with the Ubuntu Desktop Team at Canonical to bring Flutter apps to Linux. This partnership means that developers will now be able to deploy their Flutter apps to the Snap Store or other modern Linux deployments.
Many freshers are confused whether they should initially start with app or web development. The reason behind this is when you start to do something and realize you do not feel passionate about it, it’s harder to make a switch and the time that you had invested to learn that skill becomes obsolete. In this article, let’s evaluate which one of them would work out to be a better option for you, depending on your own background and app use-case scenarios.
In this post, we will compare Flutter vs React Native using six criteria:
Programming language
Technical architecture
Onboarding and learning curve
UI components
Code Reusability
Community support
Programming Language
React Native uses Javascript as its primary language. It uses the JSX concept which is a mimic of HTML and CSS which further makes the development simple and easy to understand. The availability of extensive production-ready packages makes it a ready to market solution for any app developer.
Flutter on the other hand uses the Dart programming language that Google released in 2011, which developers seldom use. For JavaScript or Java developers, Dart syntax is simple to understand, as it supports most object-oriented concepts.
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Technical Architecture
React Native uses native rendering seasoned by a few other frameworks. The application logic and native modules are bridged by a messaging channel called Native Bridge. As the Application logic is written in Javascript, there is a performance bottleneck at times communication with the native bridge.
The Architecture of Flutter is simple and more developer-friendly than react native. It uses Skia for rendering which is the tool that even Chrome uses. Moreover, Flutter, by itself, has all the native components and thus doesn’t require any bridge for the components to communicate with the application.
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Learning Curve
If you wish to learn both web and app development simultaneously React Native is the way for you. Start out with Web Development, (assuming you are good at HTML5 and CSS), learn the framework React.js, which will teach you how to reuse your code where you need to, in the form of components. It will greatly reduce your efforts eventually and would make it highly manageable and reusable, benefitting you, while also making it unambiguous for your peers who review your code. Having a good understanding of React.js greatly reduces the time you would need to learn React Native. Both the frameworks are very similar in a lot of ways, and being good in one of them, greatly reduces the amount of efforts you would have to invest in learning the other one.
Flutter any-day takes more effort in learning compared to react-native as it depends on Dart. As it is a fairly new framework, the number of tutorials and blogs are significantly lesser than React-Native. Nevertheless, Flutter has amazing documentation.
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UI components
Flutter works with 100 per cent patented widgets. Such widgets are in both Google's Material Design and Apple's Cupertino, making UI a potential consideration in whether or not Flutter replaces React Native. Moreover, Flutter’s UI components have a more native touch than React-Native.
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Code Reusability :
When it comes to code reusability React Native tops the race with its highly praised component system. Presence of the components greatly reduces the chances of code duplication and thus enhances the developers’ productivity. A single piece of code can be widely used in Android, iOS and even on the web which is currently not supported by Flutter.
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Community support :
React Native, being managed by the React community has a very strong developer community. This suggests that when you’re debugging there is a very high chance that someone has already solved your issue on StackOverFlow.com. Is there a specific package you are looking for to carry out a task for you? High chances are it already exists on react development and you just need to look it up on google, install and use it. Using React Native as a beginner can get tricky, but Expo CLI exists to assist you so you don’t need to do the dirty work right at the beginning.
Flutter comparatively has a niche community as the framework by itself is new, but it is growing at a rapid pace and chances are it might have a community as big as React-Native in the future.
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