The mobile application industry has developed tremendously over the last few years. In fact, mobile applications have become a necessity in everyday life for people and businesses.

This fast growth has brought a huge challenge for mobile application developers to meet this market demand: creating, in record time, apps that work well on multiple platforms (Android, iOS, Windows Phone, etc.). The solution to this was the development of frameworks for creating cross-platform applications, that is, from a single code; the developer can generate an application for several platforms. Two of these frameworks are the main aim of this article and will be discussed throughout the content.

This blog aims to show a comparison between two frameworks that promise to be the future of mobile application development: Flutter and React Native.

Flutter vs React Native

About Flutter

A competitor of React Native is Flutter, developed by Google and launched in 2017. Though new, it promises to revolutionize the mobile world. As a recently launched framework, it is not easy to find successful applications that have been developed on the platform. It must be awesome documentation, explaining in detail the step by step of creating applications using the tool. It has its own widgets, being totally based on the Google Material Design, which in turn has created a strand to meet the framework. Its programming language is what may be surprising to many, the Dart language framework, launched at the GOTO Conference in October 2011. Although it seems bad to adopt a new language and not widely used by the community, Dart closely resembles famous languages like JAVA, C # and C ++, promising a small learning curve for programmers with some experience.

About React Native

In view of all the problems identified in the native development and the possible solutions proposed by the community with the Cross-Platform mobile app development, some frameworks currently stand out in the market.

One example of success in the market is React Native, launched publicly with the open source in GitHub in 2015 by Facebook, joining the native APIs Android and iOS, in order to greatly simplify the mobile development. React already has in its portfolio several famous applications such as Facebook, Facebook Ads Manager, Instagram, Facebook Analytics, Pinterest, Skype, Tesla, Uber, Walmart, Wix, Discord, SoundCloud Pulse, adidas GLITCH, among others. The programming language is JavaScript, pointed to by GitHub as the most commonly used language in its platform. The framework also supports native widgets, which makes browsing and user experience quite enjoyable. It supports some Android and iOS APIs, as we’ll explain later.

React Native vs. Flutter

Both frameworks are good with advantages and disadvantages. React Native, in turn, has been on the market for longer and has more applications in its portfolio. This provides security for large organizations to risk adopting the framework, which further leverages their reputation.

Flutter, because it was released less than a year ago, still needs to be further exploited by the industry in order to make the platform gain the confidence of developers.

According to Google one of the great differences of Flutter is in relation to its speed, being able to natively show animations at 60fps and providing early compilation optimization, which makes the application portable by being compiled into code suitable for ARM and x86 architectures, compatible with IOS, Android and others. A disadvantage that can be pointed out is the use of widgets of their own, which can cause the same problem as Cross Platform Hybrid applications.

React relies on native APIs for WiFi and GPS, with good third-party solutions for cameras, sensors, biometrics, Bluetooth and NFC. However, it has a weakness in relation to building custom graphics. There are no good APIs for developing this functionality, making these types of features more complex to perform, implying native code development.

The situation is slightly different in Flutter. Most hardware APIs, with the exception of Bluetooth and NFC, are either under development or are already available. Depending on how fast all of this is done, Flutter can become the winner with respect to hardware APIs.

Part of the comparative framework made by Agile Engine can exemplify some of the differences found in the frameworks, giving an overview of the state of each one.

Which one to choose?

It’s easy to see that both flutter and React Native largely solve the problems of native development, bringing agility, performance and practicality to the developer, who can, with less code and work, achieve faster, more secure and reusable development with the best performance possible.

Pros and cons can be raised about each other, but if we take into account maturity and industry adoption, and these are the determining factors for a platform to gain market share, React Native is the winner in this dispute. Flutter promises to bring great benefits and may still surprise a lot when it comes to agility in mobile development and performance, but only time can prove whether such promises will have any real effect in the area.