By
Vineel Sai
If you want to make a cross platform app that works on both Android & IOS then you have mainly two options to choose from Flutter and React Native. Both of them are great tools to develop cross platform apps but there are some differences between them and different scenarios where you should choose one over the other we'll have a look at both of them and then we'll talk about which one is the best for you in this article.
Flutter is an open source framework developed by Google for building applications for Android, IOS, Linux, Mac, Windows, and Web. Flutter uses Dart as its programming language. Dart is a relatively new language and it is an object-oriented, class-based, garbage-collected language with C language like syntax. Flutter uses a custom graphics library called Skia to render the app’s UI, it renders the screen pixel by pixel so you get a lot of control over the look and feel of the app and also is very efficient and fast. The views in Flutter are called widgets and you can create your own widgets or download from the internet and use them in your app.
Before you choose a platform you might want to know who else is using them to get an overall idea.
Has many 1st party widgets and libraries compared to React Native.
Less code to write compared to React Native.
Looks the same on all platforms.
Uses Dart as its programming language which is a new language and doesn't have a lot of use other than for Flutter.
Lack of enough 3rd party widgets and libraries.
Small community compared to React Native.
React Native is an open source framework developed by Facebook it uses JavaScript as its programming language and is based on react framework. The working principles of React Native are virtually identical to React except that React Native does not manipulate the DOM via the Virtual DOM. It runs in a background process directly on the end device and communicates with the native platform via serialized data over an asynchronous and batched bridge. React components wrap existing native code and interact with native APIs via React’s declarative UI paradigm and JavaScript.While React Native styling has a similar syntax to CSS, it does not use HTML or CSS. Instead, messages from the JavaScript thread are used to manipulate native views.
Uses Javascript and is based on react framework so it is very familiar to developers who worked with web development.
Huge 3rd party libraries support.
Looks native on all platforms.
Very few inbuilt components.
Poor Memory Management.
React Native has released before Flutter so it has the advantage of having more time to develop and also has a bigger community compared to Flutter but the Flutter community is growing faster every day and is getting more and more popular among startups and multi billion dollar companies. If your app/company wants to build an app fast and want to release it to the public as soon as possible then you would be better of with Flutter. But if you want to build a complex app witch looks native no matter the platform and you don't mind using lots of 3rd party libraries then you should use React Native.
