This fast-paced era of technology with ever-increasing demands and expectations had the lead in making it crucial for companies to walk along. Building and creating mobile applications is the essential criteria for the tech industry but for some time now, having several platforms for which numerous applications need to be created has been a challenge. There is still a difference between the apps created as they are made by entirely separate groups so besides having to manage both Android and iOS separately, the latest risen notion of making mobile cross-platform content comes into the picture.
While the Play Store and App Store are flooding with user-friendly applications, companies need to dive into the sea. Thus, Cross-platform solutions are gaining popularity when people start understanding that it rather saves the resources used for customizing individual apps with different platforms. Hybrid apps are for building high performance, fast, stable, and scalable applications, that too more quickly.
There are several frameworks for hybrid apps development available in the market created by different brands including Flutter by Google, Xamarin by Microsoft, Cordova by Apache, React Native by Facebook, and many more. But the leading platforms in the race are React Native and Flutter. React Native development services has been consistently popular, Flutter is the only framework that has gained popularity over the years increasingly. Let’s Further look into the strengths and weaknesses of these two powerful contenders for the hybrid framework development.
Flutter
Flutter is the comprehensive app software development kit (SDK) or it can be described as a mobile development framework UI toolkit with various widgets and tools. It was created by Google in 2018 with Flutter’s first version using Dart Programming Language and ran on the Android operating system. It is used to develop applications not only for Android and iOS but also for Linux, Mac, Windows, Google Fuchsia, and the web using just a single codebase. In terms of Technology, Flutter uses a Dart Framework composed of several widgets available, understands animations and motions, has baked-in material elements, and knows how to build Widgets natively. Using the C/C++ library, Flutter’s programs are compiled such that it is closer to machine language and has improved native performance.
React Native
On the other hand, React Native is a mobile application development framework created by Facebook in 2015 which is based on React JavaScript Library. The technology used is JavaScript/TypeScript running on Node+Expo CLI running on top of React Native with an abstract layer, compiled and packed by the Metro bundler. Since the flexibility of the React Native Platform is very limited, the development of the app generally requires the use of several third-party libraries. As most of the major errors are bubbling up from the depths of the framework and then converted into JS, it is very difficult to debug React. It can be intolerable to look at the stack fragments.
Comparison
In conclusion, the pros for the Flutter framework are Cross-platform development from one codebase, Cut down on debugging time, Great app design with the same app fast fluid UI even on older devices and a completely free and open-source user-friendly platform. Whereas the cons can be Dart Language used being a stronger programming language and Flutter App sizes are larger than the native ones though they have been working on this with their own guide of reducing sizes.
However, React Native has pros like using the native UI components, Reliability, performance is faster than other hybrid apps, and is also a free and open-source framework. But it lacks back due to its Native use in code and UI components which results in learning new technologies like JSX with much more time than other familiar technologies like HTML and CSS.
All in all, each app being different there are separate spaces for both Flutter and React Native in the market. Although traditionally React Native was widely used in big apps, nowadays Flutter is also used due to several reasons including better UI and rapidly growing library support.
