Flutter vs React Native: Which Is The Best Development Trend In 2020?

Flutter vs React Native? Which one is better for cross-platform development technology that fits your business needs and budget? Obviously, both Flutter and React Native have their own advantages and limitations. So it is quite understandable if you are still considering which framework is best fits your brilliant app idea. In this article, we will split off the comparison between Flutter vs React Native. \”What is Flutter?\”, \”Will Flutter be the development trend of 2020?\”, \”Which cross platform mobile app development is best to choose?\” But before we get started, let\’s see all the statistics below!

Flutter Vs React Native: Market Share

Global Digital 2019 report reveals that internet users are growing by an average of more than one million new users every day. On average, the world’s internet users spend 6 hours and 42 minutes online each day. In addition, the current number of mobile phone users is 4.78 billion, which makes 61.51% of people in the world a cell phone owner in 2020. That’s not all. According to GlobalWebIndex, people are using mobile apps to manage almost every aspect of their lives from ordering food online to managing their finances to even finding soulmates. Now, you must be wondering why we are so much focusing on these statistics? How are they related to Flutter vs React Native? There are the reasons: 1. The fact is that mobile app developments have taken the world in just a few years especially after the year 2018. 2. At the same time, Google Trends shows that Flutter is catching up with React Native. As you can see, the growth of Flutter and React Native have been at the expense of the once-popular Cordova and Xamarin. Basically, it’s a two-horse race between the modern contenders – Google’s Flutter and Facebook’s React Native.

Flutter has 81,200 Stars on Github, while React Native has 83,200. (December 2019)

On the other hand, Statista shows that 42 percent of software developers used React Native. While Flutter is chosen by 39% of developers. Flutter vs React Native? Looking at these trends, making a choice between Flutter and React Native will not be as easy as you might think. So that, let\’s start with a basic overview of these two top frameworks with a detailed comparison!

1. Flutter vs React Native: In a nutshell

	Flutter	React Native
What is it?	An advanced SDK to help developers build natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop by using a single codebase.	A well known cross-platform framework chosen by 42% developers for app development and the 2nd highest number of contributors in 2018.
Official release	December 2018	March 2015
Created by	Google	Facebook
Free and open source	Yes	Yes
Programming language	Dart	JavaScript
Popularity	81,200 Stars on Github	83,200 stars on Github
Native performance	Great	Great
Code reusability	50-90% of code is reusable	90% of code is reusable
Top apps	Google Ads, Alibaba, Reflectly, Watermaniac, etc…	Facebook, Skype, Instagram, Walmart, etc…

2. Flutter Vs React Native: Popularity

Want to know what cross-platform apps built with React Native or Flutter look like?

Apps built with React Native

In fact, you’re already familiar with React Native apps. You may be using them daily without even knowing it.

Apps Built with Flutter

Now let’s take a quick look at popular app using Flutter.

When comparing Flutter vs React Native, React Native was launched in 2015 against Flutter of 2018. Therefore, it has a comparatively bigger community and users. By contrast, Flutter has shown an astounding amount of growth in a short time. On the other side, Flutter is supported by Google. So it is expected to catch up with React Native very soon.

3. Flutter vs React Native: Performance Comparison

When comparing the performance of Flutter vs React Native, Flutter is surely faster at coding than React Native. React Native has been successfully used in projects from small to massive like Facebook, Instagram, Skype, and Walmart to name just a few. It also has a significant fanbase of skilled developers. However, with Flutter, the C++ engine helps to support the language flawlessly. In addition, thanks to FPS animation standards with its accompanying Skia graphics library, Flutter can lead to smooth and fast apps.

4. Programming Language

React Native – JavaScript React Native is a similar framework among developers since it\’s based on Javascript. Additionally, Javascript is considered as a default language for almost every browser. That\’s why when hiring, a software development company prefers to hire React Native developers. Flutter – Dart Whereas, Flutter is based on Google’s in-house language – Dart. Therefore, it is considered as an object-oriented programming language. On the other hand, Dart is an expressive and safe language to start with. As the result,  JavaScript is easy to adopt. While Dart is not known widely in the development community.

5. Native Appearance

Flutter works without the use of additional APIs. Unlike React Native, this framework does all of the work to bridge the divide between the device and the codebase. React Native is compiled to the native code, invoking objective-C and the Java API. Not only displaying native components in iOS and Android, it also provides direct access to native functionality.

6. UI and API

When comparing React Native vs Flutter, there are similar. For example, they both offer cross-platform support. But, in many other areas, they are opposites. For example, Flutter is rich in components:

• Come with UI rendering components, loads of libraries, testing, stateful management, navigation, and device API access.
• These components will not allow you to use third-party libraries.
• Material design and Cupertino allow developers to render the UI on both iOS and Android platforms easily.

For example, React Native is less advantageous in components:

• Need to obtain these 3rd party libraries separately.
• Possibly dynamic framework with a powerful and flexible API for 2D and animation.

As we can see, Flutter has rich components while React Native is dependent on third-party libraries.

Is Flutter The Development Trend of 2020?

1. Fast Development

Flutter has a collection of visual, structural, platform, and interactive widgets. It will help you create beautiful apps faster. Added to that, Flutter has a rich widget for Material Design and Cupertino Design (IOS-style widget). It is indeed very useful for developers to build apps.

Useful links & resources

• Widget catalog
• Material Components widgets
• Cupertino (iOS-style) widgets

Productive Development

• Make changes to your source code iteratively, using hot reload to instantly see the effect in the running app
• Write code using a flexible type system with rich static analysis and powerful, configurable tooling.
• Do profiling, logging, and debugging with your code editor of choice.

Dart is optimized for UI

• Mature and complete async-await for user interfaces containing event-driven code, paired with isolate-based concurrency.
• A programming language optimized for building user interfaces with features such as the spread operator for expanding collections, and collection if for customizing UI for each platform

2. Native Performance

Flutter aims to provide 60 frames per second (fps) performance, or 120 fps performance on devices capable of 120Hz updates.

• Flutter is different than most other options for building mobile apps because Flutter uses neither WebView nor the OEM widgets that shipped with the device. Instead, Flutter uses its own high-performance rendering engine to draw widgets.
• Flutter uses Dart for development. Dart runtimes and compilers support the combination of two critical features for Flutter: a JIT-based fast development cycle that allows for shape-changing and stateful hot reloads in a language with types, plus an Ahead-of-Time compiler that emits efficient ARM code for fast startup and predictable performance of production deployments.

3. Flutter Community Is Growing Fast

The community of Flutter is growing fast, proven to be very useful for developers when having issues with development. Besides, Google provides Flutter developers with informative tutorials on flutter.dev.

4. Perfect for an MVP

In startups, there is a definite need to learn about the impact of new product development, a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the best approach to verify a business idea. By doing so, you can avoid the failures by predicting it upfront and also get the required feedback. As to its high speed, ease of integration, and flexible UI, Flutter has become a perfect choice to create a mobile MVP.

Flutter vs React Native: Which One Is Better?

We have listed a detailed comparison of both frameworks – Flutter vs React Native for mobile app development. Above all, Flutter vs React Native, what to choose in 2020? When to choose Flutter? And when to choose React Native? Both Flutter and React Native reduce time-to-market. Moreover, their third-party libraries and ready-to-use components make it more efficient to use them to build your app. More than just speedy development, these cross-platform can also reduce app development costs as well. So, the framework you choose should depend on your needs and preferences.

• Do you want to build an application quickly and efficiently without much customization? If yes, React Native and Xamarin is the way to go.
• Or do you have a certain look of your app in mind? Then perhaps Flutter, with its code reuse on customization.

Remember that each application is different. So you must consider each one – Flutter vs React Native is better. Each of the frameworks can help your application spread its wings and fly. Keep in mind…

It’s always worth discussing your project with an experienced team of developers.

How To Hire Flutter App Developers

In the United States, React Native developers have an average yearly salary of $110,000 per year. In Ukraine, the average React Native Developer rate is $30,000 a year. Luckily, hiring a React Native developer in Vietnam will not be as costly. Like React Native developers, Flutter developers are in high demand. Hence, their wages are higher than those of other software developers.

Vietnamese mobile developers have an annual salary which range from $500 to $1400 USD per month.

Recently, according to Coursera Global Skills Index 2020, Vietnam ranks 22nd in global technology skills and 2nd in Asia Pacific countries as well.

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