mobile app and it is important to understand the difference between flutter and react native to be able to choose correctly. The decision will reflect in just about every aspect of the development as critical elements are contingent on the stack technology you choose from maintenance, scalability, security, development costs, front-end and back-end app development, launch time to user experience, and other critical elements. Technology stack for your mobile app simply means a combination of programming languages, frameworks, platforms, tools, libraries, software products, and solutions used by the development team for the mobile app. In this article, we will discuss react native vs flutter.
What is React Native?
React Native is a popular open-source mobile application development framework that uses JavaScript instead of Dart like Flutter. It is written with both JavaScript and XML-Esque markup with a focus on the native rendering of mobile applications that run on iOS and Android as it uses the same user interface building blocks as regular iOS and Android applications.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is an open-source portable UI framework that’s used to build cross-platform applications from a single codebase. It is a comprehensive software development kit that functions with a programming language called Dart and can create mobile applications for iOS, Android, desktop and web while coding once.
Difference between Flutter and React Native
Flutter and React Native are two technology stacks for mobile applications that enable multi-platform application development and we’ll be comparing them on a few aspects to see how they compare to each other.
Comparing user experience
A critical element in mobile app development is user experience (UX) and it is important to consider which framework will help your app have a meaningful user experience for your users to continue using your product. So how do both developmental frameworks compare on UX?
A major appeal of the Flutter framework is its ability to create an application with a rich user experience. The toolkit features tools, elements and provides its own customizable widgets to create custom app designs to produce an aesthetically pleasing mobile application. With flutter as the developmental framework the Dart language helps to prevent clutter on the user interface by allocating objects within a one pointer bump and lag so that one can design a mobile application with high-end user experiences
React Native developmental framework also provides a canvas to design apps with good user experience, but in less capacity when compared to flutter. Style Design in iOS and Material Design in Android evolve every day and with this comes changes in requirements of native platforms that the React Native framework find difficult to keep up with.
Testing
Flutter has a variety of features that allow automated testing of applications at the unit, widget and app integration stages. The framework has detailed documentation in regards to testing and in building applications for Android and iOS including in the deployment process of the app.
React Native on the other hand does not have official support for testing at the user interface and integration stages. Unlike flutter, which offers automated deployment of the app to the App store, rather developers need to set up a manual deployment process through Xcode. Testing react native mobile applications at the user interface and integration testing has no official support which means the developers will have to make use of third-party tools to detect bugs.
Application size
Another notable difference between flutter and react native is the size of the finished product. The React Native developmental framework can iterate applications faster at a smaller size, especially by enabling Proguard and the enableSeperateBuildPerCPUArchitecture which helps generate split builds automatically for native and external libraries and resulting in a reduction in size.
When developing an app with flutter, the kit runs on Dart so the Virtual Machine of Dart and the C/C++ engine will influence the size of the app. Although the Flutter framework can contain codes and assets, reducing code size, it still delivers the app is a larger size than the React Native framework.