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In recent years, mobile development has been marked by the rise of multi-platform technologies such as Xamarin, Ionic, Angular, native React and Flutter. The goal is to code only once to make an application that will be available for iOS, Android, Web, see Windows 10.
The popularity of React on the Web has made React Native a very popular solution for cross-platform development. Recently, it is Flutter, pushed by Google, that is making a lot of talk about it. Let’s take a look at these two technologies…
Maturity for Mobile Development
React native is an older technology from React, which is currently the most popular web development framework. It is a mature technology.
Flutter is a very recent technology that is growing very fast. It is Google’s multi-platform front-end development technology.
Below are the search trends with React Native in red and Flutter in blue.
Maturity for Web Development
React, in Yellow, is by far the most mature technology for web development, as the current leader in this field.
Flutter for web is no longer in beta and is now usable in production. However its ecosystem is far from the rich JavaScript ecosystem.
Programming language
React native uses JavaScript, which is the de facto standard for the web. The framework imposes relatively few specificities, and using it means for many to write pure JavaScript by adding React specific functions and widgets, as well as JSX, which allows to write pseudo HTML tags in the code.
Flutter uses Dart, which is currently mostly used for this Framework. In the future, Google would consider replacing Android with Fuschia OS, which would be entirely written with Dart. This is only speculation. The advantage of Dart remains a relatively clean…
