Creating mobile applications has always been a fundamental pillar of the tech industry but having multiple platforms for which different apps need to be developed has been an issue for some time. Apart from having to maintain two teams, one for Android and one for iOS, there’s always a gap between the applications developed as they are made by totally different teams. That’s what gave birth to the idea of creating cross-platform mobile applications.
There are many types and solutions but the most popular one right now is by creating compiled apps that give the closest performance to that of the real native applications. The most popular solutions to build mobile apps are native or cross-platform approaches using React Native or Flutter. While native development is positioned as AAA technical solution, it has some disadvantages that create market space for cross-platform apps to come in. In general, native development requires more effort from the development team to accomplish the project but it gives full control over tricky technical stuff under the hood. On the other hand, if you choose cross-platform, it can significantly speed up the development process due to a common code base, make project support easier and reduce expenses for development.
One more advantage of native over cross-platform development is performance. In the technical world, you can encounter “cross-platform apps are slow” stereotypes. We decided to test if it’s true and to what extend cross-platform apps are slower than native.
In this article, we share the results of performance tests showing mathematical calculations of number Pi implemented in native and cross-platform approaches.
Flutter is a reactive cross-platform mobile development framework that uses the Dart language. Dart and Flutter have been created by Google who’s using the framework for some of its biggest applications and is constantly pushing the framework towards being the ultimate solution for creating cross-platform apps. Its initial alpha release was back in May 2017 so it’s much younger than React Native.
React Native is perhaps the renowned world champion of cross-platform mobile development. React Native is a javascript framework built upon the React library, both created by Facebook, and it allows you to ship IOS and Android apps with a single code base. It’s used primarily by Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb, and many others. React Native started out as an internal hackathon project at Facebook back in 2013, and in 2015 it was released to the public.
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#flutter #reactnative #native #reactjs #mobileapps