Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Choosing between Flutter and React Native in 2024

This article summarizes the important factors involved when deciding between the two leading cross platform mobile development frameworks of Google's Flutter and Facebook's React Native.

Flutter

Advantages

  • ✅ It can design complex UIs which are standardized across Android & iOS resulting in less platform dependent bugs.
  • ✅ Easier to learn for existing mobile developers. 
  • ✅ Dart is a fully object oriented language, so is great for large enterprise size codebases.
  • ✅ Good debugging ability and hot reload.
  • ✅ A self contained easy to use IDE (Android Studio).
  • ✅ Quick ramp up time.

Disadvantages

  •  Dart is a new language to learn, and isn't used anywhere else except for Flutter.
  •  Skills availability in the market is not as good as React Native, although it is growing.
  •  All of the UI must be in Flutter - you can't mix native UI components with Flutter.

More suited to

  • 💡 Existing mobile development team.
  • 💡 Graphical or UI heavy apps.
  • 💡 Greenfield projects.
  • 💡 Minimum viable products / startups.

React Native

Advantages

  • ✅ Large number of resources and libraries available.
  • ✅ OTA (Over The Air) updates; updates to the app outside of the app stores. 
  • ✅ Knowledge of React can be applied to web development. 
  • ✅ Easier to learn for web developers.
  • ✅ Very good skills availability in the market.
  • ✅ Can be integrated with existing native UI components.

Disadvantages

  •  Command line JS-based toolchain.
  •  Javascript / Typescript is not as suitable for very large codebases as is Dart.

More suited to

  • 💡 Existing web development team.
  • 💡 Migration of an existing app, with the ability to keep some native UI as is.

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