Why Flutter Is Getting More Popular Among The Startups?
By: Jay Singh
Tags: Flutter App, App Development, Flutter App Development, React Native

Many businesses these days are considering mobile apps as their leading factor to reach to the customers. Since smartphones are available in almost every hand, and the applications are quickly making their place among the websites. Apps are fast and easily accessible. And therefore, with a mobile application, businesses can reach a considerably higher number of people around the world.

This growing opportunity has made the mobile application market very competitive. Every day new ideas and innovations are coming to this continuously expanding emerging market.

If you own an online business or planning to start one, then having a mobile application is the first and one of the most important things to have. This will help to reach your ideas, products and services to a large number of customers.

When you decide to build an app for your business, you need to think about managing it’s development costs, time and finally your energy.iOS and Android are the two most prominent mobile operating systems which are currently used by billions of users. However, the user base of these platforms are different. In order to cater both user bases, you need to create your application for both the platforms.

As you can correctly guess, building your app for both platforms is going to increase the cost, time and energy 2 times.

To make it affordable and smooth, a few cross-platform tools are available, which help you in building your app for both the platforms. React Native and Flutter are the best ones.

Let’s explore them in detail.

React Native

React Native was released in 2015. It is an open source framework. React Native was built by Facebook to cater their internal demands of building cross-platform app. Eventually, they decided to make it open source and bring it to the community of developers.

It was time-consuming for a mobile app developer and costly for the business to create separate applications for both Android and iOS. To do this the companies have to hire different developers, and that would, of course, increase the budget. This problem was solved with React Native which is cross-platform.

React Native supports both Android and iOS because it is a mixture of JavaScript and XML-esque markup. The other benefit of React Native is it’s huge ecosystem. It also has a large number of widgets, methodologies and tools to ease the development process.With all the benefit React Native come with some limitations.

Incompatibilities between community libraries and different versions of React Native

Emulator issues

Problems with react-navigation

The need to frequently reinstall packages

It Lacks the Security Robustness

Small choice of components in libraries

Documentation still needs an upgrade

Complicated UI element and animation

Flutter

Flutter surprised the whole techno world when it was launched in May 2017. Dart is the programming language Flutter is written in. Google started this new programming language which has made programming comparatively more easy for the mobile app developers. This cross-platform has many advanced features, and it uses many languages to create a single application for Android and iOS users.

What Flutter Is

Flutter doesn’t use any tax tag which is familiar with the internet, and many mobile app developers find it unique and exceptional. The fundamental difference between React Native and Flutter is that, React Native uses JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to create Android and iOS applications while on the other hand Flutter uses Dart to do so. Dart is a highly productive language too. Since everything, including the UI, business logic etc, is written in Dart, Flutter becomes relatively easy for the developers to build and maintain apps.

The two most important features of Flutter-

Performance

Dart is the language developed by Google and Flutter uses this language to create mobile apps. Dart helps in creating an efficient and effective app development flow, and this feature makes it popular amongst developers.

Hot Reloading

Developers can see the changes instantly. This helps both developers and designers because they can collaborate easily while working on the same project. This feature also decreases the time required to develop an app.

Conclusion

If we look at both Flutter and React Native, we would find that both of them have their pros and cons. React Native is best suited for developers who know the React framework and prefer to work with web technologies. On the other hand, Flutter is good for startups due to its performance, ease of development and a much easier maintenance in the long run.