React Native and Flutter emerged as titans, giving developers the ability to, as React Native puts it, " write once, run anywhere ."
The rise in popularity of these frameworks is evident in Google Trends searches, indicating a steady increase in interest.
React Native vs Flutter
via Google Trends Whether you are a seasoned developer, a tech startup founder, or a software engineer researching React alternatives, comparing React Native vs Flutter will help you choose the perfect framework for your next mobile app project.
What is Flutter?
Flutter, developed by tech giant Google, entered country code +233, ghana phone numbers the mobile development scene in 2017. It is an open-source UI software dev kit that lets you create native mobile (iOS and Android), web, and desktop apps from a single codebase.
If you compare the statistics of React Native and Flutter, you will see that Flutter has been chosen by many app developers in recent years.
In 2023, 46% of software developers chose Flutter as their favorite mobile app development framework.
Cross-platform Mobile Frameworks Chart
by Statista Flutter uses the Dart programming language , which supports both ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation for fast startup and just-in-time (JIT) compilation for development, delivering a smooth development experience and excellent runtime performance.
Flutter Features
Here is a summary of the key Flutter features designed to streamline app development and increase performance:
Hot reload
Flutter's Hot Reload feature allows developers to see code changes reflected in the app instantly without losing any previous work.
Pre-designed widgets
Flutter offers a rich set of configurable widgets for building user interfaces. Unlike native controls, these widgets are built in Flutter, providing a consistent platform experience.
Whether you need simple components like buttons and sliders or more complex ones like date pickers and navigation drawers, Flutter's widget library has options for everything.
Platform-specific styling
Flutter is ideal for ensuring a consistent look and feel for your apps across platforms, but it also provides the flexibility to incorporate platform-specific design elements for native apps.
For iOS apps, Flutter offers a comprehensive set of Cupertino widgets . These widgets are meticulously designed to fit Apple's UI Guidelines, resulting in apps that are truly native to the iOS ecosystem.
On the Android front, Flutter introduces Material Design widgets . Rooted in Google’s design principles, these widgets embody a modern, clean, intuitive visual language to provide Android providers with a natural and consistent experience.
Developers can seamlessly mix and match Cupertino and Material Design widgets within a single app. This flexibility allows them to create truly adaptive apps that leverage the strengths of both platforms.
DevTools
Flutter comes with a suite of performance and debugging tools called Flutter DevTools. Its key features include:
Widget Inspector to examine the widget tree in real time
Performance overlay for analyzing performance metrics
Memory profiler to optimize memory usage
Console for centralized debugging information
The Flutter DevTools package is available directly from the Flutter development environment. It provides various custom options and enables vendors to build high-quality Flutter apps.
Flutter Prices
Flutter is a free and open-source platform.
What is React Native?
Born from the innovative minds at Meta, React Native has revolutionized mobile app development since its public release in 2015. React Native is an open-source mobile app framework that enables you to build native mobile apps using JavaScript and the React library.
One of the key benefits of React Native is its ability to leverage developers’ existing React knowledge. Translating JavaScript code into native components allows for seamless application of web development skills to mobile app development data. This minimizes the learning curve, eliminates the need for new programming languages, and speeds up development.
