React Native vs Flutter

by Online Tutorials Library July 14, 2022

React Native vs Flutter

React Native

React Native is the mobile app development framework, which is developed by Facebook. It is an open-source tool which is released in 2015. Using React Native, we can build iOS and Android applications. React Native utilizes the JavaScript and React. React Native is primarily used by Facebook, Airbnb, Instagram, and many more.

Development

React Native uses the set of components which is provided by the react-native library for mobile app development. React Native uses the virtual DOM, but it does not manipulate a DOM. It uses DOM to communicate with the native UI elements.

Starting React Native is an easy task. We can start it with installing the create-react-native-app package with npm install. React Native app development is a cool thing, and it provides an Expo integration. The Expo facilitates to run your code on your mobile device.

Performance

React Native compile approach is different than Flutter. The complete application does not compile to C/C++ or native language. The only the UI components are compiled to their native equivalents, and JS runs in a separate thread.

Flutter

Flutter is a reactive cross-platform mobile development framework which uses the Dart language. Flutter and Dart are created by Google. They are using the framework for some of its most significant application. This framework pushes towards the ultimate solution for building cross-platform apps. The Flutter initially releases its alpha version in May 2017, which is much later than React Native.

Reactive Programming with Flutter

Flutter is a reactive framework which a powerful and useful, especially in the app development. Let’s illustrate it with an example: suppose you want to send a request to a server and want to do something depending on its response. If you act before the response is back, i.e. before you have an object will result in a bit mistake, a null reference.

It becomes out of control if your data coming asynchronously and many parts of the program need to respond to the incoming data. This problem gave birth to a paradigm in programming known as reactive programming.

Development

Widget is the main building block of the Flutter application. These are analogous to the component in React Native. Flutter comes with the ready-to-use widget, which uses the material design concepts. There are two types of widgets, these are stateful widgets, and stateless widgets just like function and class component in React.

Flutter widgets are not adaptive, so we have to make the platform-specific adaptation manually.

Flutter supports the Hot-Reload features, which enable the rerun of the application. It speed-up application development. It currently supports on IntelliJ Idea, Visual Studio Code, and Android Studio.

Performance

When we talk about the performance, Flutter’s approach is quite different than the React Native, or even NativeScript. The Flutter applications are compiled using arm C/C++ library so that it is near to machine language and gives better performance.