React Native vs Flutter : Which framework is the best for your career ?

Should you learn React-Native or Flutter in 2021?

First of all let’s look at what’s similar between the two and why exactly we comparing them. React native and flutter are basically cross-platform mobile app development frameworks. Flutter was made by Google and React native was made by Facebook. These companies are indeed backing these frameworks.  They are both open source and they have huge tech companies backing them. So both of these probably are the best options. As a developer your end goal would be to build out a mobile app. You can use both of these frameworks to build Android and iOS apps at the same time with the same codebase. So that’s why we are comparing these two and now let’s discuss about the differences between flutter and react native.

React or Flutter?

Okay, let’s discuss about how flutter is better than react native. The biggest thing is the performance! Flutter will definitely perform better than react native and there’s a solid reason behind that. When you talk about your mobile phones let us talk about iPhones and androids. The iPhones run a native iOS kernel and they support native apps written in objective-c or Swift. Similarly Android supports native apps written in Java or Kotlin. When you talk about developing a mobile app and react native,  you’re basically using your JavaScript knowledge to write your application logic. JavaScript code is going to be interpreted by your iOS or Android device. when you run a react native app on your mobile phone, there’s something called a JavaScript bridge or a webview which is basically mapping your JavaScript code to your native code. Right?

What would You do then?

So your native app components that run on the app need to communicate with your JavaScript code which happens via a JavaScript bridge and you know there’s a three-step process there. Every action that you take needs to go via the bridge to the JavaScript code and the reaction has to come back the same way. Depending on your application, this can slow down your performance at various levels and flutter handles this better.

When you build an app with flutter you are certain that it will look the same between your Android and iOS counterparts. By the way, React native was launched in 2015 and flutter was launched in 2017. React native is let’s say to your senior to flutter so definitely the community is bigger the amount of packages and libraries and plugins that you have for react native will be much bigger than flutter. But that is growing so much.  There is a lot of the important packages that you would need in a standard app are already made in flutter. You may start building your app and you will certainly run into an issue where you can’t find an existing plugin for what you want to accomplish . Whereas you would find it for react native it’s just normal and it happens.

Be a master in any one language

When a framework is new but having said that if you can build your plugin on your own so let’s say you can build your state management system on your own for flutter. And that’s a good thing that you can build it out and you can actually contribute to the open source community. You also can help someone else who will probably run into the same requirement. They can use your code too. But you will have more libraries and better plugin support for react native than flutter .

So react native (RN) has a bigger community just because it’s been around longer than the flutter. Further community is great too, it’s going pretty fast but having said that RN has a bigger and better community just because it’s older right  The biggest advantage for react native is that it is based on the existing skills that you probably already have you know HTML CSS JavaScript. React is certainly number one for web. If you have some experience with react then bringing that over to react native is very seamless.

It’s very easy that’s a big advantage a lot of the web developers who are familiar with HTML CSS JavaScript. React can come down to RN and start building apps. But it is a weakness for flutter which introduces a new programming language called dart. You have to learn if you want to build apps. So I would say if you’re a beginner, or react then you can definitely start using flutter for your app development career. Because you only have to learn dart as opposed to learning HTML CSS JavaScript. Most of the developers are existing web developers. They are coming down to mobile app development and for them getting started with react native would be easier.

Conclusion :

So in the end I would say that the most important factor that you need to consider is the speed of shipping. If you are familiar to Javascript and strong enough and do not want to waste time learning new programming laguage, then go for React native, otherwise, you can use Flutter for your app development career.