Choosing the Right Mobile Development Framework (React Native vs Flutter)

For people who are new to Cross-Platform Mobile development, React Native and Flutter are two frameworks enabling developers to have smoother development experience, build performant apps, and reach all platform audience or users.

Now, let’s jump into the difference between the two frameworks and let us help you pick the right framework for your Mobile Application development.

Architecture

Before the react-native, the hybrid mobile applications would use a web view to render the UI and utilize Cordova or PhoneGap modules to interact with the platform native capabilities like Bluetooth, camera, location services, or others. All the additional modules and added webview impacts the mobile application size.

Whereas building with React Native, the application doesn’t rely on the webview. Its architecture consists of two main parts – Javascript and Native code. Both of these modules share asynchronous JSON messages using the communication link called the Bridge.

The bridge acts as a bi-directional communication channel between the two modules and translates messages to talk with the other. So when the application is executed, Javascript sends a series of messages to the native code and the native code implements it. Since these messages are asynchronous, they are non-blocking and resulting in smoother view rendering.

When coming to Flutter, it doesn’t require any bridge to interact with core modules but has the components inbuilt. Hence it ships with bigger size and rich in components. Flutter applications are hosted on a portal runtime called the Flutter engine. The Dart uses SKIA, a C++ engine takes care of the UI rendering making the interactions and performance reactive and smooth.

Performance

The performance of any applications is heavily dependent on the source code and third-party module implementations. In most of the cases, React Native uses a lot of third party libraries to implement a custom functionality or view component. Whereas for the Javascript bridge, on heavy payload communications, animations, or rendering huge datasets to screen the Bridge gets clogged with events and screen appears to be lagged, frozen or broken. React Native has slower performance compared to Flutter.

Coming to Flutter, there are no additional communications required and the components are built in making the application performance run smooth and very reactive. That’s highly noticeable when running both the react native and flutter applications side by side especially the animations at 60FPS. Thanks to Flutter’s AOT and JIT compilers handling the native code compilation.

Learning Curve

Starting with React Native. It is a more familiar framework for all the front end developers having prior experience with Javascript or React. Building applications with React Native is like walking in the park for them. It’s pretty straightforward, easier to adopt, and implement. Tools like Expo help even more in building applications, bundling icons, fonts, assets, and even takes care of deployment to Google Play Store, Apple App Store, Ubuntu Store, and other platforms.

Newer developers getting into React Native without any prior Javascript, React or HTML knowledge are in for a ride of learning. If that’s the case, I suggest going for Flutter. Any developer with prior experience with object-oriented programming languages will find Dart easier to understand and write code faster.

Dart language has been gaining popularity and the adoption rate is increasing since its release yet its community support is smaller compared to the humongous Javascript community.

Simply, if you have more web developers choose React Native. Otherwise, Flutter is the way to go!

React-native-vs-flutter-syntax-differences

Differences: React Native vs Flutter

React Native
  • Built by Facebook and released as an open-source project in 2015
  • Uses a bridge to translate touch events to native code
  • Code is written in Javascript XML (JSX) or Typescript XML (TSX)
  • Heavily customizable or needs to be built manually and can be installed with third-party libraries.
  • Application performance is close to a native application but it’s heavily dependent on third party library implementations.
  • Adopted by many big companies because of product maturity and huge community support from developers all over the world
  • Provides Hot reloading
  • The learning curve is smaller with prior Javascript experience
  • Application Size - Smaller and heavily dependent number of third-party modules.
  • Microsoft, Expo, and other tools enable the faster builds and make deployment easier to the respective platform store
  • Apps built with React Native are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Airbnb, and others
Flutter
  • Built by Google and released as an open-source project in 2017
  • Flutter components are built-in and compiled A Head Of Time thanks to Flutter Engine.
  • Built by Google and released as an open-source project in 2017
  • Comes with highly customizable widgets but with less third-party libraries.
  • Application performance is fast or equal to the native implementation.
  • Comparatively new to the industry and has good growing community support but smaller compared to react-native.
  • Hot Reloading, JIT and AOT compilation
  • The learning curve is a bit steep.
  • Application Size - Comparatively bigger.
  • Can build Debug, Release, and Profile deployments and requires manual deployment to their respective platform.
  • Apps built with Flutter are Google Ads, Hamilton, Realtor.com, Square, and others
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