Flutter vs React Native which is easy and best to learn | SCODE – Solution Codes
What is Flutter?
Flutter is Google’s response to the cross-platform development problem discussed above. Google has been churning resources into Flutter’s development for quite a few years, before releasing it to the public in 2017, during their Shanghai Keynote.
Flutter can be used to create mobile applications for iOS and Android, quickly and efficiently. The major factor that convinced several developers to shift to Flutter, is that the project will have a single codebase. Despite the single codebase, the Flutter framework provides enough flexibility to embrace the differences in both platforms.
What is React Native?
React Native is another cross-platform mobile application development framework. It’s been around for a greater time than Flutter, ergo has a bigger community too. React Native was created by a software developer called Jordan Walke, a Facebook employee. He drew major inspirations from XHP, an HTML component framework for PHP. It was first implemented for the Facebook news feed in 2011 and later on the Instagram application.
Performance
Both React Native and Flutter provide awesome performance to users. But there are some areas where developers may find an edge between the two. Some may like React Native while some may choose Flutter to work with.
Let’s get more clear insight through the comparison right here.
React Native:
React native works excellently when you choose to build native apps. You are not going to face any problem regarding its performance. You will get standard and reliable performance, no doubt. But, the issue begins with when you build a hybrid app. You may face a problem with its architecture, libraries, and native components.
Flutter:
Well, as far as Flutter is concerned, you get everything customized right of your choice. Developers can use the same existing code to develop applications. Importantly, Flutter is helpful in this context as it is backed by the Powerful C++ engine.
Flutter – Advantages and Disadvantages
Advantages of Flutter:
1. Hot Reload and fast coding
2. One codebase, 2 mobile platforms (for example, IOS and Android)
3. Up to 60% less testing
4. User-Friendly Design
5. Same app UI, even on older devices
Disadvantages of Flutter:
2. Libraries & support – impressive, but still not as rich as native development
3. Platform risk is high
4. App’s size is bigger than react native
React Native – Advantages and Disadvantages
Advantages of React Native:
2. One codebase, 2 mobile platforms (for example, IOS and Android)
3. It uses a wildly popular language – JavaScript
4. An active – and vast – community
5. Easy to learn for React developers
Disadvantages of React Native
2. Fewer components out of the box
3. Fragile UI
4. Apps are bigger than native ones
Flutter Architecture
Flutter is very young, which makes everybody uncertain about the best architecture to
implement for your application. However, there are a few architectures that are popular
among the Flutter community.
You can use the BLoC architecture, which stands for Business Logic Component.
The architecture was depicted by Google in the DartConf2018 and it states that
the business logic should be taken out of the presentation layer and placed in the
business logic components.
There are other architectures present in the realm of flutter, for instance, if you’re
more comfortable using Redux, you can use these patterns instead, and there are packages
in Flutter that make this possible. For small applications and trying out the framework,
storing the state inside of the components would suffice.
React Architecture
There are two main patterns in building React/React to native applications, which are Flux
and Redux. Flux is the one created by the framework creators, Facebook, while Redux is
the community’s most popular option. These frameworks are about unidirectional data flow
and storing your application’s state in one central place called Store, and make your app
components as stateless as possible. You can also use the Context API which is a new
feature of React for managing the state.
Testing
React native has a few unit-level testing frameworks available. The tools like Jest can be used for snapshot testing. However, when it comes to integration or UI level testing, there is no official support from React Native. There are third-party tools like Appium that can be used for testing React Native apps but they are not officially supported.
Flutter does provide a rich set of testing features to test apps at the unit, widget, and integration levels. Flutter has a cool widget testing feature where we can create widget tests to test the UI and run them at the speed of unit tests.
Conclusion
React Native and Flutter both have their pros and cons, but the idea is to fill the gap between the two platforms(Android and iOS). Some of the industry experts have predicted that Flutter is the future of mobile app development.