As mobile app development continues to grow in popularity, businesses are looking for ways to make cross-platform apps that can be used on a variety of devices.
In this blog, we will compare two popular frameworks for cross-platform development; Flutter and React Native. We will see the pros and cons of each framework and discuss which one is better to use in 2022.
What is Cross-Platform App Development?
Before we start, let’s define the term “Cross-Platform App Development”.
Cross-platform apps are apps that can be created using a single codebase and function virtually identically on both iOS and Android operating systems.
Both Flutter and React Native are the best cross-platform development frameworks available in the market. They both use native widgets to create a highly customizable, responsive UI while sharing code across different platforms.
The Flutter framework is created by Google while the React Native framework is created by Facebook. So, these tech giants have very large teams that deal with everything from the platform’s SDKs to its documentation, support, etc.
Comparison of Flutter and React Native
The main point of differentiation between Flutter and React Native is that React Native does not compile into a native mobile language (Java, Swift, Objective-C), but rather simply runs its JavaScript code. While Flutter compiles its Dart language into native, which can impact performance.
One more big difference is that vanilla JavaScript (besides JSX) is utilized for writing components on React Native. Facebook developers suggest using Flow or TypeScript with React due to its dynamic nature. For Flutter, Google suggests using Dart for writing code as well because of its static typing system.
In our opinion, the choice to use one of these 2 technologies should be based more on your preferences rather than on their actual features and capabilities.
Pros and Cons of Flutter and React Native Apps
Apps developed with Flutter can not be differentiated from native ones. They come with the same functionality and the same look & feel (other than some platform-specific stylistic aspects).
The main problems that people usually complain about when building apps using React Native are related to its runtime environment, which is heavier than managing separate processes for each architecture. It means that you will be unable to pull off a pure native app performance using React Native, although you can get near.
Now, let’s delve a little deeper into the technical pros and cons of these two frameworks.
Native Performance
React Native comes with a better JavaScript virtual machine that is faster than V8 thanks to its JIT compiler. It also takes advantage of being an ahead-of-time compiled framework, which means that you are free to ship whatever codebase you need because it will be compiled into a native executable.
In practice, React Native is as fast as pure native apps because it can achieve the same performance as an iOS app without requiring any changes to the iOS build settings.
App Size
React Native apps generally come with a JavaScript runtime that weighs around 300kb gzipped, although it is possible to decline this number by tweaking some options such as Bypass filling (which will force React Native to skip a procedure of filling its virtual DOM with the result of diffing it against the native UI) as well as by setting use DeveloperMode to true.
Flutter comes with an ahead-of-time compiler that lets developers ship only the codebase required for the app they are building without having to bundle anything with it.
It is possible to run Flutter inside an existing JavaScript VM if you need to, which will allow you to save on the space needed for your app.
Minimal Required SDK Version
React Native can usually be created against any iOS 9+ or Android 5.0+ SDK without any problem. But it goes without saying that to get the best performance, you should target the latest SDK versions available at the time of your release.
In practice, React Native apps can be built against older iOS and Android SDKs with a limited set of attributes being available at runtime, although to get all the features you should still target the latest SDK versions available.
UI Development
Flutter comes with its own set of widgets for rendering the UI, which means that you can reuse existing iOS or Android code when developing Flutter apps.
Some third-party libraries are available for making it easier to reuse existing native components, although this is still a work in progress as it is difficult to map Flutter widgets to existing iOS and Android UI components.
Debugging
React Native comes with its own debugger that can be attached to your running app on iOS and Android, which gives developers a preview of the current state of the JavaScript virtual machine with various tools for inspecting memory usage or tweaking some options on the fly.
Flutter development comes with its own debugger too, which can be attached to your running app on iOS and Android providing developers with a preview of the current state of the rendering engine along with various tools for inspecting memory usage or tweaking some options on the fly.
Conclusion
Both Flutter and React Native are excellent choices for cross-platform application development. While they share some similarities, there are also some key differences that you should be aware of before choosing which one to use.
Taking the decision of the right cross-platform framework for your business application or startup app idea depends largely on your development experience, development team, and which native elements your project needs to access.
We hope you will make an informed decision about which framework is right for your next project, with the help of this article.