Flutter vs React Native, which is the best mobile app development framework?

We all know that the mobile strategy for the product organization is of paramount importance today. If you have not yet built your mobile application, then you are already behind your competitors. However, If you are starting off now, or, if you are planning to replace your old mobile application with a technology refresh, the first question would be, which framework do you choose?

At a broad level, there are two paths available for application development frameworks. You may either choose native app development, or cross-platform app development (here I am going to ignore the hybrid applications development, as it does not have any characterized benefits over the other two, for mobile apps).

The biggest advantage of a cross platform development environment is that, you have a single code base that can be used for both Android and IOS applications; for a native app, you will have to maintain two separate code bases, which is a drain on resources.

Native languages and frameworks, such as those supported by Swift or Kotlin, or even Angular, gives complete API access, and also gives very good debugging support.

More and more organizations are leaning towards a cross-platform development strategy for their mobile application, because of its obvious advantages – single code based, less maintenance headaches, quick development time and time to market.

So, in this blog post, I will compare Flutter and React Native, the current leaders in the cross platform development framework ecosystem.

React Native was open-sourced by Facebook in 2015. It is currently the leader in terms of adoption for mobile app development.

Flutter, another opensource, was released by Google in 2018. It is the newer kid on the block, however its popularity has skyrocketed in the last couple of years. It is in the top 20 active repositories in github (React Native is in the top ten).

Both these app platforms are supported by third party libraries, that you can choose from for prebuilt functionality, both have good performance, brings provide high code reusability. Being first off the block, React Native has a larger ecosystem of libraries. However, Flutter has built much of the functionality within the framework, and does not need third party libraries extensively. They both have free IDE’s, support hot-reload (good for developers), good OS/driver capabilities.

If you are writing apps on React Native, all you need to know is javascript. On the other hand, if you choose Flutter, you need to write in DART. DART is a new language, a mixture of Java and Javascript. It is strongly typed and object-oriented, so gives fewer error opportunities, as opposed to Javascript, that is a poorly typed language. Mobile app development is a specialized skill anyway, so, the development language should not be a very big criteria affecting your choice.

The biggest advantage of Flutter over React Native is the availability of UI widgets. Widget libraries are pre-compiled elements that can be dragged and dropped onto your mobile app UI development. These reduce development time for Flutter greatly, and as Flutter adds more and more widgets and functions in the Framework, everything will be available in the framework, greatly improving app development times.

Another advantage of Flutter is that most native components are in the framework itself, you don’t need to communicate with any bridge components for native access. For React Native, you need the javascript bridge to communicate with native modules, which results in poorer performance.

In terms of development support, React Native install and compile environment is much better than Flutter's. On the other hand, Flutter documentation is much more detailed.

In conclusion, I would say, that Flutter has the better feature set and is a more comprehensive package than React Native, and I think, it will rule the mobile app framework market in a few years from now. If you are starting on your Mobile Application strategy, you should strongly consider using Flutter. On the other hand, if you have already started on React Native, or you have a set of readily available Javascript developers that you want to redeploy to your mobile efforts, then you can’t go wrong with React Native.

Let me know your thoughts.