Flutter Vs React Native Best Choice For Cross Platform Development

React Native and flutter are considered as future of cross-platform app development. But both technologies are having their own advantages and disadvantages. So choosing between them is always a hectic task for developers. In this blog, we break down the features and evaluate which is the best. Programming language One of the common benefits of choosing React Native and Flutter is that it uses a single programming language for developing iOS and Android applications. React Native uses JavaScript as its programming language. It is an added advantage because developers are already familiar with javascript and no special training required. Thus developers can easily adapt to the framework. Flutter uses Dart programming language and it is new to the developers. Those who have a good grasp of JavaScript can easily learn dart. And the Dart language is easy to understand and has good documentation. To put it in a nutshell, React Native has an advantage since it has much familiar framework language. Communication with native components React Native framework uses flux architecture. It requires a JavaScript bridge to communicate with native components which can result in poor performance. Flutter uses skia architecture. Flutter contains all native components inbuilt in the framework so that bridge for communication is not required. Installation of frameworks Both flutter and React Native installation are not an easy or a one-liner. To install React Native there is a node package manager. For Java developers, this might seem to be easy, but other developers should learn node package manager for installation. Compared to React Native, Flutter requires an extra step for adding the binary to the path and downloading it from source code. Setup and configuration To assist setup and configuration of framework to developer machine we must need a good guide. But React Native documentation is very limited and it only mentions how to create a new project. Flutter is known for its documentations and hence setup and configuration are completely aided by getting started guide for Flutter. Thus Flutter offers good documentation and CLI support for setup and configuration. UI and API When developing cross-platform mobile apps, support for the native component is key. Without the support of the native component, our app won’t feel like a native app. It’s very important that the framework has an API to access the native modules without any pain. Flutter is rich in development APIs and UI components while React Native is too dependent on third-party libraries. So Flutter has an advantages in this. Development time and productivity Developer productivity is the key to building apps faster. In this regard, it’s very important to be able to focus on app development without any kind of wait or distraction. Being a mature framework, React Native has great developer support in terms of IDEs and language features. Flutter is fairly new at this point but will catch up very soon as the community around Flutter grows. Community support As soon as developers start to show interest in a technology and adopt it in their development process, they allways form a community to share knowledge. A strong community helps developers to learn from each other and solve the problems they are facing. The React Native community and resources have grown in size since the framework was launched. Even though Flutter is still fairly new, although community support is growing rapidly. Release operations Realease operation is one of the most important but hectic process where you deploy mobile applications to app store. When it comes to cross platform mobile applications it is more painful process. Release process of Flutter is more easy compared to React Native because flutter has build in automation tools which makes it simple.