Currently, with smartphones increasingly accessible to the entire population and users constantly connected to the web, companies have been forced to have a presence with attractive mobile applications that allow their customers to access all its services. To achieve these applications in native language, React Native and Flutter have been the main options among developers.
React's younger brother, this is how developers refer to React Native, an open source framework created by Facebook to develop applications on Android, iOS and Windows. It is one of the most popular mobile app frameworks, but little by little Flutter is gaining favor with developers.
Created by Google, Flutter is a software development kit for building natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop devices from a single code base.
React Native vs Flutter: advantages and disadvantages of each
The last few months to years, trends in multiplatform mobile application development technology have been dominated by these two frameworks. Looking back at the numbers a bit, React Native launched in 2015, while Flutter was released in 2017. The two technologies rank highly on GitHub, React Native 79,000 stars and Flutter 71,000 stars.
Looking a little further, in a matter of public interest, Flutter has seen its popularity skyrocket during 2021, with a significant growth that has surpassed React Native in the public interest.
Flutter benefits
- A code base: this framework allows you to develop applications for Android and iOS and because it renders everything by itself, it lets the developer run everything within a single code base thus saving a considerable amount of time.
- A beautiful interface in no time: In Flutter, the user interface is built with widgets, these are small UI building blocks and using a technique called Composition. The whole process to create the interface is similar to using React components.
- The representation of pixels: because Flutter manages each pixel on the application screen, the widgets created will look the same on all mobile devices, including older models, this eliminates device support problems and allows create user interfaces that look exactly the same on both Android and iOS.
- Rapid development: One of the features in Flutter that has really made it shine among its users, the hot reload feature provides the ability to make changes on the fly, allowing you to see them immediately during development.
- Cross-platform application development: As already mentioned, the Flutter SDK is a cross-platform tool that allows us to develop for desktop, mobile devices and the Web using a single code base.
React Native benefits
- It is a framework with a fairly stable API and that has the support of Facebook, plus a fairly extensive community of developers.
- Any developer with a background in React and JavaScript can learn React Native fairly quickly, taking advantage of React's existing libraries, tools, UI design frameworks, and tutorials.
- Like Flutter, it enables rapid development for iOS, Android, and the Web with a code base.
- One of its main benefits is that React Native allows you to add new code to a running application, reducing the risk of losing some functionality during a full reload or rebuilding of the application.
So, the question remains, which one to choose to develop your mobile application in 2022? Everything is left to the developer, analyzing well the needs it presents for the development of the application and reaching the conclusion about which native framework fits what it requires.
While Flutter's tools and features are geared not just for the web and mobile devices, but older and embedded desktops as well, projects that are developed with React Native tend to be lighter. This comparison and many others make the last word, as we said before, the need of the developer.
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