An Overview of the two most popular and trending frameworks for Hybrid Application Development.
Introduction
Hybrid Application development is ruling the Mobile Application development industry rather than Native Development from a couple of years onwards. Business needs are changing from day to day because of an increase in growth and demand. One of the most popular frameworks that became a friend for most of the mobile application developers is React Native, which was introduced by Facebook in the year 2015. until 2015 there was no perfect framework for hybrid application development even though Phone Gap was available in the market. Phone Gap is based on the C# programming language. Developers didn’t love that framework much because there are certain disadvantages in Phone Gap.
The Reasons for the Increase in Demand for Hybrid Application Development —
Developing a Mobile Application is really fundamental for the business, but developing the applications for different mobile platforms is becoming an issue for the business investors because of the following problems —
- They need to maintain different developing teams for different platforms which might lead to a waste of time and money.
- It is difficult to find skilled developers, especially in the Asian countries like India, China, Bangladesh, Russia etc… because Apple has a low market in the Asian countries.
- There is a development gap between some of the more popular platforms. Deciding which platform to use or focus on can cause confusion.
The above reasons gave birth to the idea of creating cross-platform mobile applications.
There are lots of solutions available in the market but the most popular and trending one right now is by creating compiled apps that can run on both IOS and Android platforms without creating any issues by providing a good performance to the user. The most powerful competitors in that field at this moment are Flutter and React Native. Let’s discuss the strengths and weaknesses of both Flutter and React Native and perform an objective comparison on React Native and Flutter I’ll give the conclusion weather React Native is going to die or not.
React Native
React Native is a powerful javascript framework developed by Facebook for developing cool amazing applications within a short period of time, which is having a capability to run on both IOS and Android platforms. It is developed based on React, it is a Facebook’s JavaScript library for building user interfaces — but instead of targeting the Web Platform, it targets on mobile platforms.
Flutter
Flutter is a new Hybrid mobile application development framework developed by Google and released in the year 2017. It is built and based on the compiled programming language called Dart, which is a google’s general-purpose programming language released in the year 2011. this newly introduced framework will help us to build a variety of critical applications within a short period of time.
One of the advantages of Flutter is that it uses Dart as a programming language, the applications that build with the help of Flutter is able to run on both Android and IOS platform. the applications that are built with the help of Flutter are ridiculously fast in performance.
The Differences Between React Native and Flutter
Till now I’ve completed the introduction of React Native and Flutter and also I explained about why Hybrid Application development is in demand, let’s look at the key differences with React Native and Flutter.
User Interface
React Native
React Native’s UI experience is like using HTML without any CSS framework. While that sounds weird, it actually helps you to build on the native components for both Android and iOS, which provides a better user experience (UX). There is also huge community support, and there are third-party libraries that let you get off the ground in no time.
Flutter
Flutter has built-in UI elements which are probably called as widgets — All the required shapes, graphics, animations that are required for an application will be created with the help of widgets. If you want to customize your UI easily and quickly, you can use Material Design widgets in your Android application development and Cupertino widgets for IOS application development. However, there is limited support to the community for building and maintaining these widgets. As the framework matures, widgets will be the way to quickly iterate and build Flutter apps.
Performance
React Native
Applications that are built with the help of React Native is having an issue with rendering large dataset because React application runs with the help of javascript bridge, we can improve the speed of an application with the use of third-party libraries. However, in the race of a competitive world, React Native can’t able to beat flutter in terms of performance.
Flutter
Applications that are developed with the help of flutter are having the greatest speed over React Native because it is having an advantage of using Dart. Dart is one of the fastest compiled based languages in the world. Flutter applications don’t require any intermediate bridges to run the application like React Native that’s why Flutter is more powerful than React Native.
Development Time
React Native
React native is having several third-party libraries to design a good user interface.it does not require you to write and add separate files for complex UI support, which reduces the development time and improves workflow for the developers. with the help of React Native, developers can develop the cross-platform applications very quickly within a short period of time.
Flutter
The biggest disadvantage of flutter is that we need to add separate code files for Android and IOS platforms when building complex UI elements. To customize the UI elements we require Dart programming language, Developers need to keep a lot of effort for designing the UI for an application. But once the UI is designed with good looking features then automatically it will give better user experience in both platforms rather than Native Applications.
Developers usually say that Applications that are built with the help of Flutter will give more user experience than Native Applications.
Community Support
React Native
React Native’s community support already exceeded Flutter’s — React Native is currently the most popular framework on Stack Overflow, with community support as proof. React Native is completely open source. there are many blogs and forums to help for beginner programmers.
Flutter
Flutter was released in the year 2017. it has been almost 2 years and also there is no much love for the Dart programming language in the StackOverflow community. the community support for the Flutter is quite minimal, but the flutter developers at Google are really good, Flutter documentation is really fantastic and easy to follow for the beginners as well.
Code Structure
React Native
React Native has really done a fantastic job in segregating logic, navigation, and design for an application. This allows you to build out complex mobile applications in an easy manner. this is one of the reasons why developers love towards React Native more than other Frameworks.
Flutter
Flutter doesn’t separate any data, template files, and UI elements. because it uses Dart has a core programming language for building the UI elements even in the complex applications also. So we can simply say that everything is Inline.
Conclusion
React Native currently has steady growth, great community support, amazing code structure, and a really good adoption base for developers. while it comes to Flutter —
It has great potential as part of the future of mobile app development. what I think that
Flutter + Dart + LargeCommunity = Recipe for Success
The only thing that’s stopping most of the developers is that Google’s well-known move of shutting down open source and acquired products.
Hope this article helps you to understand the main difference between Flutter and React Native and the future scope.
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