Why Use Flutter Over React Native for App Development?
4 min read
When building the next cross-platform mobile application, you must consider the best technology stack that suits your purpose. You will go for the framework providing you with the best set of tools.
While React Native remains a top choice for businesses across industries, Flutter suddenly emerged as a more competent dark horse. It is true, especially in highly competitive mobile app markets filled with small business apps. For example, the number of Flutter app developers in India is rapidly overtaking React Native because faster and low budget development gave Flutter a clear edge.
Here we will explain their respective strengths and weaknesses and how Flutter provides a better choice.
Introducing React Native
React Native is a dynamic and open-source mobile app development framework that has been released way back in 2015. It has quickly risen to popularity for its excellent capabilities in developing both mobile and web apps.
Let’s look at some excellent stats for the React Native popularity.
- A Statista study in 2020 found that 42% of app developers prefer to React Native for cross-platform development projects.
- According to StackOverflow, 11.5% of app developers prefer to React Native expressly for the native tools and libraries it offers.
- According to StackOverflow, 58.5% of the app developers love React Native.
Which Projects are Suitable for React Native?
Here some of the app projects that perfectly suit the React Native capabilities.
- Simple cross-platform app projects.
- For faster app prototyping.
- Hybrid app projects with simple UI
- Apps are willing to boast of a native look and feel with responsive UX through FlexBox.
- Mobile apps loaded with reusable components.
- Mobile apps capable of working with synchronous APIs.
Introducing Flutter
Flutter is a Google produced open-source app development kit that has been released in 2017. It is a high-performance framework used for mobile apps, desktop apps and web apps while using the same codebase. Flutter is unique in many respects, including its robust UI design kit and use of object-oriented programming language called Dart.
Let’s look at some great stats for the popularity of Flutter.
- According to Statista, 39% of the developer population prefers using Flutter for cross-platform mobile app projects.
- According to StackOverflow, Flutter is loved by a whopping 68.8% of the developers now.
- According to StackOverflow, 7.2% of the developers prefer using Flutter for its robust libraries and tools.
Which App Projects are Suitable for Flutter?
Flutter is suitable for development projects like the following.
- MVP app projects
- Mobile and web apps with material design.
- Cross-platform apps are relying on OS-level features.
- Advanced level OS plugins with easy user experience and logic
- Developing high-performance apps using Skia rendering engine.
- App projects with flexible UI using dynamic widgets
Why is Flutter better than React Native?
Though both Flutter and React Native are equally high-performance frameworks and are well-supported platforms for cross-platform development, Flutter has the edge over the former, thanks to the below-mentioned advantages.
User Interface (UI)
Flutter offers the vast majority of the components required for cross-platform app projects, and since these components come as built-in, it requires far less code to communicate with the native UI elements of the device.
The Flutter framework comes loaded with a rich set of UI rendering components, accessing device API, in-app navigation, mobile app testing, state management, and a rich set of libraries. Thanks to these built-in components, the developers need to rely less on third-party libraries
Firebase Support
Flutter comes with well-documented support of Firebase. While using Flutter, the app developers can use all functions of Firebase across all instances of native mobile development platforms.
App Size
In stark contrast to the apps built with React Native, Flutter APIs maintain a smaller size and footprint. As compared to the react-native-based apps, Flutter apps are considerably smaller in-app size, consuming less memory space of devices.
Superb Performance
In terms of app performance, in particular, Flutter takes the lead. In most tests carried out by experts, it has performed a lot faster compared to React Native.
React Native uses Javascript to communicate with native components. In contrast, Flutter simplifies this communication as it doesn’t need to create a bridge for interacting with the native platform-specific features. This ensures optimum development pace and quicker run time.
With Flutter, one can optimize animation runtime speed up to 60 frames per second. The framework also works great for reusing existing code.
When it comes to developing hybrid apps using React Native, things get more complicated as developers need to integrate architecture, native components, and the library smoothly into the app without any issues. This is where Flutter makes things easier as using existing code gets simpler. Moreover, Flutter also gets the support of the C ++ engine.
As Flutter code is compiled right into the native platform code of Android and iOS, there are fewer performance issues than any other cross-platform frameworks. When it is about app performance, Flutter appears to have a clear edge over React Native.
Conclusion
Both React Native and Flutter have their respective strengths and weaknesses. But Flutter seems to have an edge because of the reasons mentioned above. According to many leading industry experts, Flutter offers everything that the future of mobile app development easily reckons with. As far as the above comparison is concerned, Flutter is a clear winner in all essential aspects that developers consider crucial for any app project.
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