What to Choose Between React Native & Flutter for Mobile Apps ?

CodeGeeko.com
6 min readOct 24, 2021

Mobile apps are the most popular type of software in the world. There are already over 2.5 billion mobile app downloads every year. This is likely to grow exponentially in the coming years with more and more people using apps for their day-to-day activities.

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With so many mobile apps being developed, it can be hard to keep up with all of them. The idea of cross platform development is to provide a single codebase that can be deployed on multiple platforms.

Cross platform development has several benefits including reduced risk, increased speed, and cost savings for company’s IT department. We explain 2 popular mobile development cross platform

  1. Flutter is a cross-platform mobile app development framework that is written in Dart. It is also the most recent development in the field of cross-platform mobile application development.
  2. React Native is an open source, JavaScript library for building native applications for iOS and Android with one codebase.

Flutter

Flutter is an open source cross-platform mobile application framework. It was created by Google and it is used for building cross-platform web and native mobile applications.

As of now, there are more than 500 apps that have been built using Flutter Framework. Flutter is a new cross-platform development tool based on the Dart programming language. It is used for building modern apps and games.

Flutter gives you all the benefits of native performance, but without the need to rebuild for Android and iOS. Flutter can also be used as an alternative to React Native for cross-platform mobile development. In this article, we’re going to explore what Flutter is, its features, how it compares to other cross-platform tools like React Native, and how it may impact you as a developer or business owner.

Flutter’s main advantage over React Native is that it allows developers to build apps with a single codebase instead of two separate ones — one for each platform — in order to make it easier for their app to maintain speed at scale

Benefits of Flutter

Flutter is a cross-platform app development SDK for building high-quality, beautiful, and performant UI. With Flutter, developers can build apps that are on par with the latest ones in terms of performance.

Some of the benefits of using Flutter are

  1. It allows developers to build apps that are on par with the latest ones in terms of performance.
  2. It is easy to use and comes with an extensive documentation
  3. With its intuitive gesture recognition system, Flutter also offers amazing features like gestures which act as shortcuts for users to do things like flick between screens or scroll through content.
  4. It has no external dependencies that developers need to worry about
  5. Flutter has a strong community of enthusiastic users

The top 10 mobile apps developed on Flutter are:

  1. Spotify
  2. Twitter
  3. Facebook Messenger
  4. Whatsapp
  5. Snap Inc
  6. Airbnb
  7. Slack
  8. Ebay
  9. Walmart
  10. Heyzap

React Native

React Native is a JavaScript library for writing native apps using React, which is a UI toolkit. It was introduced by Facebook in 2013 and has been gaining popularity ever since.

React Native provides us with an easy way to build apps that can be deployed anywhere, including the iOS and Android platforms. Moreover, it allows us to leverage the React ecosystem of tools like Redux, Webpack, BabelJS etc.

Further, React Native is an open source framework for building native mobile apps using JavaScript. It is made to be used with the React framework which makes it easier to create cross-platform applications. React Native provides a set of APIs, tools, and build systems that make it easy to build apps in both Android and iOS environments in a matter of hours or days instead of weeks or months.

React Native supports two main types of components: View Components and Container Components. The difference between the two is that View Component are “pure DOM” meaning they are rendered by React Native on the screen while Containers are “hybrid” components meant to be used in conjunction with other React Native components or webviews.

It uses an approach based on declarative programming called reactive programming, which allows developers to create dynamic interfaces using declarative design patterns such as redux and flux without needing to declare event handlers explicitly.

Benefits of React Native

React Native is gaining momentum in the market and it is becoming a good option for companies to build mobile apps.

React native has many benefits such as:

  1. It allows developers to work on one codebase and target multiple platforms
  2. It simplifies the process of developing mobile apps. It can be done faster and with less code.
  3. It offers cross-platform support allowing you to develop apps for iOS, Android, and Web without changing code.
  4. The entire app can be written in JavaScript which makes updates much easier -
  5. Apps built in React don’t need a bridge to send data from one platform to another

​The platform provides a vast number of features that can be used by anyone who has knowledge of JavaScript. It offers support for Android and iOS, as well as OS X and Windows platforms, making it easy to deploy cross-platform

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The top 10 mobile apps developed on React Native are:

  1. Instagram
  2. Facebook Messenger
  3. Whatsapp
  4. Twitter Lite
  5. Tinder
  6. Snapchat
  7. YouTube
  8. Instagram Stories
  9. Facebook Messenger Lite
  10. Wiki TV

How to choose ?

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There are a lot of factors that should be considered before choosing which cross platform to use for mobile App development.

Some of the factors that you should consider include the design and content, overall size and complexity, ease of implementation and maintenance, compatibility with other software, and engineering resources.

There are a lot of options in the market when it comes to different cross platforms. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses. It is important to look at what each platform can offer before deciding which one would work best for your App development project.

Conclusion

Both Flutter and React Native have a number of pros and cons. A lot of developers are struggling with the decision whether to use Flutter or React Native. Both have been used by big companies including Facebook, Alphabet, Twitter, Instagram

In the end, it all comes down to what you need your app to do. In FaceBook’s case, they needed a mobile app that could be easily ported from one platform to another and they wanted their UI toolkit to be consistent across iOS and Android

If you want an app that is simple and easy-to-use for both iOS and Android users then Flutter is your best bet. However if you want an app that can be completely customized without any restrictions then React Native is the way to go

Python Role in Mobile Cross Platforms

Flutter introduces Python as its first supported language, allowing developers to leverage this language in their app development process. This will not only make Flutter more competitive but also provide a tool for building UI components with ease.

In the last few years, though, there’s been a lot of talk about how React Native apps can be built with Python instead of JavaScript. This means that developers can use more efficient tools and languages to build apps that are faster and easier to debug.

React Native with Python is a popular topic among developers. In the past year, the trend has really taken off and a lot of developers have come out saying that they can build better apps using this technique than they could before.

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