Why Flutter trumps React Native as the Top-Choice cross-development Technology?
The three important elements you must understand when considering Flutter or React Native for your upcoming project.
With newer technologies spawning as we breathe, most of us are spoilt for choice and older allegiances hardly mean anything. Almost every business, whether big or small, relies heavily on mobile apps to stay abreast with the competition. Not so long ago, apps were developed for iOS and Android separately. In order to speed up the app development process, native solutions gave way to cross-platform solutions that allow developers to build apps using a single language for both platforms.
Tech Biggies Facebook and Google both have their cross-platform offerings in the form of React Native and Flutter respectively. While React Native held the top spot and the faith of the developer community for long, Flutter is more than catching up. Let’s discuss three important elements that will help you compare both these technologies to see how they fare.
- Architecture:
React Native uses the JavaScript bridge to communicate with the native modules while using the Flux architecture from Facebook. Within the framework, React Native lacks native components and hence must rely on JavaScript as a bridge between native modules.
Flutter, on the other hand, uses Dart which has inbuilt native components and frameworks like Material Design and Cupertino along with the use of the Skia C++ engine, its protocols, compositions, and channels. In short, the Flutter engine houses everything needed for app development.
This obviously results in a much smoother performance with Flutter as compared to React Native and better stability too.
- UI components and development API:
The React Native framework provides only UI rendering and device access APIs while being excessively reliant on third-party libraries to access most of the native modules.
The Flutter framework is packed with UI rendering components, device API access, navigation, testing, stateful management and loads of libraries. This means you have everything you need within the Flutter framework itself and consequently need to rely less on third-party libraries.
This difference in available components for speedy and stable app development makes Flutter app development a better choice as compared to React Native app development.
- Testing Support:
No technology can be truly robust unless it has an effective testing framework associated with it. React Native uses a few unit level testing frameworks within JavaScript and tools like Jest for snapshot testing. However, for the more necessary UI level or Integration testing, it has no official support and relies on some third-party tools which are not officially supported.
Flutter provides a wide palette of testing features at Unit, Widget and Integration level along with comprehensive documentation on testing.
This conspicuous lack of testing features in React Native as compared to Flutter makes Flutter app development more robust and easier to roll out.
There are n number of areas where you could compare both the technologies but we feel these are a few important elements you must consider for a quick read.
To summarize, Flutter app development is on the rise and fast becoming the preferred choice for modern app developers. While React Native has its loyalists, the tide seems to be shifting slowly and surely in favor of Flutter.
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