React Native vs Flutter: My Opinion

In the current age of modern innovation, React Native and Flutter are the two most popular cross-platform technologies. While React Native is developed by the people at Facebook, Flutter is created by the people at Google. While both are powerful cross-platform app development frameworks, each has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. In this article, I try to share my opinion on which one I would prefer and why.

React Native

React Native is an open-source cross-platform framework that uses JavaScript and React. It allows developers to create applications for both iOS and Android using a single codebase. React Native leverages native components, providing a native user experience. It also supports hot reloading for developers to quickly view the code changes in the application. It has a robust ecosystem with a very strong community, allowing access to native modules for platform-specific functionality. Few companies using React Native are Facebook, Instagram, Shopify, Disord, etc.

Advantages

1. Large Community: React Native has a well-established community resulting in a lot of resources, libraries and third-party packages.
2. Familiar Language: If you have experience with JavaScript and React, you can easily transition to React Native.
3. Strong Native Integrations: React Native has a strong emphasis on native integrations, which allows it to take better advantage of platform-specific features such as push notifications, camera access, and location services.
4. Quick Development & Hot Reload: It offers rapid development thanks to its vast library of third-party packages, and familiar language. It also supports hot reload which allows us to view quick changes we did to the code in the application.

Disadvantages

1. UI Customization: Achieving highly customized UIs can be more challenging with React Native than Flutter due to reliance on native components, but can be easily rectified with the help of third-party libraries and packages.
2. Platform-specific code: When integrating a few features that are platform-specific, you might need to write platform-specific code.

Flutter

Flutter is an open-source framework based on the Dart Programming language for building natively compiled cross-platform applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. It provides an amazing set of highly customizable widgets to create beautiful user interfaces. Flutter offers near native performance through AOT (ahead of time) compilation. It has a growing community with strong support from Google. Few companies using Flutter are Google, BMW, Alibaba, etc.

Advantages

1. Highly Customizable UI: Flutter has a great set of customizable widgets, making it excellent for creating unique and beautiful user interfaces.
2. Consistency Across Platforms: Flutter ensures a consistent UI and user experience across various platforms
3. Performance: It compiles to native ARM code, delivering high performance.
4. Strong Widget library: It comes with a comprehensive library of widgets reducing the need for third-party packages.

Disadvantages

1. Learning Curve: Dart is a less common language, so the learning curve might be steeper for developers who will have to learn Dart first, and then move on to learn Flutter
2. Smaller Community: Flutter's community is growing rapidly but the React Native community is stronger and larger (thanks to the JS and React community💪🏻). A smaller community means fewer resources and packages.
3. Large App Size: Flutter apps tend to be larger in size compared to Native apps or apps built with some other cross-platform frameworks.

My Choice (with Justification)

In my opinion(don't hold grudges🙁), I prefer React Native over Flutter. Here are a few reasons through which I justify my choice -

1. JavaScript/React Expertise: If you already know JavaScript and React, you can easily pick up React Native.
2. Access to larger Community and Ecosystem: The larger community and ecosystem help the developers find help, participate in discussions, and find more third-party libraries and packages to use.
3. Wider Industry Adoption: React Native has been adopted by numerous large companies including Facebook, Instagram, Microsoft, and much much more. It makes it more compelling to learn it.
4. Better for Large Projects: React Native is better suited for larger projects because of its better performance with large codebases. React Native uses the Virtual DOM, which allows it to render only the necessary components, rather than rendering the entire app with every change, resulting in better performance for large-scale applications.
5. Stronger Native Integration: React Native has a stronger emphasis on native integrations, which allows it to take better advantage of platform-specific features such as push notifications, camera access, and location services.
6. Maturity and Stability: React Native is a mature framework with a well-established release cycle and strong backward compatibility. This can be advantageous for projects that require a stable environment.
7. Platform-Specific Optimization: React Native provides a robust bridge allowing you to easily access platform-specific features and APIs. This can be crucial if your app requires deep integration with device capabilities.
8. Seamless Web and Mobile Integration: If you're working on a project that requires a smooth transition between web and mobile development, React Native for the Web allows you to reuse code between the two platforms.

Conclusion

In summary, React Native might be better if you have existing JavaScript & React Expertise, have a larger codebase, need rapid development with a wide range of third-party libraries, or need stronger native integrations. However, it ultimately depends on the specific requirements of the project and the development team's expertise. I personally would go with React Native as I am more comfortable typing code in JavaScript/TypeScript rather than using Dart and a few other reasons that I mentioned above. No doubt Flutter is amazing and has its advantages as well (rich widget library, better performance), but the final choice of which one to use depends upon the developer.