Chaverri Davis

Chaverri Davis

1572488109

Flutter vs. React Native vs. Xamarin

What is cross-platform development?

Cross-platform mobile app development allows you to build mobile applications for multiple platforms such as iOS and Android with just one technology stack.

This means that instead of creating multiple versions of your app, each written using the dedicated native language for each platform, you can write your code once and deploy it on several platforms at once.

Cross-platform development advantages

There are several pros when it comes to cross-platform mobile app development compared to native mobile app development, including:

Write once, deploy everywhere

The most significant advantage of cross-platform development is having a single codebase that you can export to multiple operating systems.

Uniformity across apps

Having a single shared codebase allows you to maintain the same look, feel, and experience across all platforms. All updates and fixes are also automatically reflected everywhere.

Saving resources

Instead of having separate teams with different skill sets working on multiple native versions of your app, you only need one team working on a shared codebase. This allows you to leverage smaller teams and quicker development time to save time and money.

Audience reach

Having your app published on multiple platforms allows you to increase your market reach without any added effort, consequently increasing your chances of getting more downloads and users.

Cross-platform development disadvantages

While cross-platform development comes with many benefits that make it an optimal solution for many developers and companies, they come with a few drawbacks and some trade-offs including:

Performance issues

While cross-platform frameworks work on providing apps that are as close to native apps as possible, they still don’t integrate seamlessly with the respective platforms and have inconsistent communication between the native and non-native components, reducing the app’s speed and degrading performance.

Inconsistency with platforms

Cross-platform development tools don’t have all the features offered by each different platform, so you might need to employ some workarounds. It may also take these frameworks some time to get up-to-date with the newest features and updates released by the platforms.

Limited features

There are many native-only features and integrations available in each platform that are not available in cross-platform apps, which limits the user experience you can provide.

Cross-platform mobile app development tools

There are many cross-platform mobile app development tools and frameworks available, including:

We will take a closer look at the first and arguably most popular three frameworks available right now: Flutter, React Native, and Xamarin.

Flutter

Flutter framework logo

Flutter is an open-source, cross-platform mobile application development framework created by Google in 2017. It’s the newest framework of the three and in short order has become one of the most popular frameworks among front-end devs.

Flutter advantages

Some of the reasons Flutter is currently one of the most loved cross-platform frameworks include:

  • Complete development ecosystem: Flutter offers APIs, pre-built widgets, CLI tools, and pretty much all the tools needed for cross-platform mobile app development.
  • Customizable: While it offers an extensive library of pre-built widgets, you can also create your own or customize pre-existing ones.
  • Reliability: Developed and supported by Google
  • Hot reload: Allows developers to fix bugs faster through faster code implementation
  • Free: Open-source platform

Flutter disadvantages

Flutter poses a few challenges, especially being a new framework, including:

  • Continuous integration support: Lacks compatibility with CI tools such as Travis and Jenkins.
  • Large app size: Flutter apps can be quite large compared to other frameworks that can force developers to reduce the number of libraries and packages used, compress images, and even steer away from using animation altogether in favor of reducing their app’s size.
  • Native APIs: Flutter doesn’t expose many native APIs for you to use. That’s why, for many purposes, you will need third-party packages. Which also means that you will have to depend on the ecosystem.

However, you can always write your own native code that accesses the needed feature, and Flutter will give you a bridge to use that feature from within your Dart code.

Apps built using Flutter

  • Google AdWords
  • Google Greentea
  • Alibaba
  • AppTree
  • Reflectly
  • Hookle
  • Topline
  • Birch Finance
  • OfflinePal
  • Hamilton (musical)
  • BetaBubs

Flutter development tools

React Native

React logo

React Native is an open-source, cross-platform mobile app development framework created by Facebook in 2015.

It enables users to use JavaScript and React along with native platform capabilities to build mobile apps.

React Native advantages

Some of the pros of React Native include:

  • User Interface: Implements native UI components, allowing apps to look like native apps, and therefore providing a high-quality user interface.
  • Ready-made components: Offers a vast library of UI components, allowing for faster development time.
  • Access to native functionalities: Like camera, accelerometer, etc.
  • Platform-specific code: Allows you to further optimize your separate native apps by using native code.
  • Hot reload: Allows developers to apply changes to the apps right away without having to recompile the apps.
  • Reliability: Developed and supported by Facebook.
  • Free: Open-source platform.

React Native disadvantages

Unfortunately, React Native still has its pitfalls, including:

  • Navigation: Navigation built in React Native is not seamless and not comparable to native navigation.
  • Complex UI: React Native struggles with building complex animation and transitions.

React Native development tools

Apps built using React Native

  • Facebook
  • Facebook Analytics
  • Facebook Ads Manager
  • Instagram
  • Uber Eats
  • Tesla
  • Skype
  • Pinterest
  • SoundCloud Pulse
  • Walmart
  • Bloomberg
  • Discord
  • Myntra
  • Gyroscope
  • Chop
  • Vogue
  • Artsy
  • F8

Xamarin

Xamarin logo

Xamarin is an open-source, cross-platform mobile app development framework that was founded in 2011, making it the oldest of the three.

Xamarin advantages

Xamarin cross-platform mobile app development pros include:

  • Performance: Xamarin apps are known for having almost native-like performance levels.
  • Complete development ecosystem: C#, .Net, and Microsoft Visual Studio with Xamarin are all you need to build mobile apps with Xamarin, making it one of the most complete cross-platform mobile app development frameworks out there.
  • Seamless user experience: Xamarin.Forms allows you to take advantage of standard interface elements by providing a library of templates so that you can reuse your code across different platforms. You can also use Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android for manual customization, if needed.
  • Free: For small teams.

Xamarin disadvantages

However, as any cross-platform development framework, Xamarin does have its setbacks, including:

  • Updates delay: Whenever new platform features or updates roll out, there is usually a delay until these changes are reflected in the Xamarin tools, which may cause issues with your app.
  • Large app size: Xamarin apps can add around 5 megabytes for releases and 20 megabytes for debug builds, making them larger than native apps. This is primarily due to the libraries used to translate C# calls into native calls.
  • Heavy graphics: Xamarin is great for apps with a simple UI. However, building complex applications or mobile games with Xamarin might not be the best thing to do as you will have to spend a lot of time writing platform-specific code, which defeats the purpose of using it.
  • Platform-specific code: You might need to re-write some parts of the UI in your app in native code. That means that you will need some knowledge in native programming languages such as Kotlin or Java for Android, and Swift or Objective-C for iOS.

Xamarin development tools

Apps built using Xamarin

  • Skulls of the Shogun
  • SuperGiant Games
  • Storyo
  • Insightly
  • FreshDirect
  • The World Bank
  • Just Giving
  • Olo
  • Thermo Fisher Scientific
  • APX

Flutter, React Native, or Xamarin?

Now let’s look at how these cross-platform development tools compare to each other.

Performance

One of the most important factors you should consider when choosing a cross-platform development framework is app performance.

While React Native and Xamarin provide near-native app performances, some argue that Flutter’s performance is better because Dart code is compiled to a C-library, which means it’s close to the native code.

This improves communication speed and provides better performance.

However, it’s hard to benchmark performance as it depends on many factors and variables including device, code, app, and features being used.

Popularity

A graph comparing Flutter, React, and Xamarin.

With over 1.6 million developers across 120 countries, Xamarin has definitely developed quite the userbase over the years. However, this is largely due to the fact that it is one of the oldest frameworks out there.

Since its release, React Native has slowly but surely gained popularity, surpassing Xamarin in 2017.

Most loved tools among front end developers.

According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019, Flutter ranked as the most loved framework out of the three, with 75.4 percent of users expressing interest in continuing to develop with Flutter.

React Native came in second with 62.5 percent, followed by Xamarin with only 48.3 percent.

Development languages

The cross-platform tool development language is another crucial factor to consider when making your decision.

Xamarin uses .Net languages like C# and F#, which are common languages and can be used to write native platform code.

While React Native uses JavaScript, which was not invented for it, it still does a great job with React Native apps.

You might encounter a few issues or come across some required workarounds as JavaScript was originally developed for the web.

As a result, some APIs might not work, while others may have to be proxied by React Native.

Flutter uses Dart, which was also not invented for mobile apps. However, it is managed by Google, the same company that created Flutter.

That’s why they make sure to adapt Dart for Flutter and mobile app development, making it better in many ways than JavaScript or C# with fewer workarounds needed.

Graph comparing different languages.

According to the TIOBE Programming Community Index, C# is the fifth most popular programming language worldwide as of October 2019, followed by JavaScript in seventh place.

While still relatively new, Dart is ranked as the 26th most popular programming language in the world.

This gives an advantage to React Native and Xamarin, which both work with a familiar language that can help boost your productivity and save you from enduring a steep learning curve.

Components

React Native offers some pre-built and partly adaptive components like buttons and text inputs.

However, most of these components aren’t really adaptive. If you need something a bit more advanced, you would have to build it yourself by recomposing these built-in components.

Flutter provides a more extensive library of components, which are called widgets. However, these pre-built components are non-adaptive.

The language offers widgets for both iOS and Android, but you have to switch between both manually as it doesn’t have components that automatically adjust their styles depending on the platform you’re running.

Xamarin.Forms offers a complete cross-platform UI toolkit consisting of native UI components for both platforms, which are compiled into platform-specific UI components.

You can also use Xamarin.iOS or Xamarin.Android for custom app UI and better performance.

Code reuse

Code reuse is what brings developers to cross-platform frameworks, so how much of the code written with each framework is actually reusable?

React Native allows you to write the code once and ship anywhere, but it also embraces platform differences.

This means that from time to time, you have to find out on which platform you’re running and load a different component or set of components depending on the platform you’re running.

Still, a considerable part of the codebase can still be reused.

Flutter’s codebase is more reusable as it allows you to define one UI widget tree and reuse the defined logic so you don’t have to do a lot of differentiation, which you can also still do if you need to.

Xamarin prides itself on allowing developers to reuse up to 96 percent of their C# code by leveraging the language.

Xamarin also offers forms components, making it better for code reuse than React Native and Flutter which share an average of 60–90 percent of codes.

Pricing

While all three tools are free, open-source platforms, Xamarin is only free for individuals and small companies.

For large enterprises, single-user licenses start at $499 and go anywhere up to $2,999 for a Visual Studio Enterprise annual subscription.

While this might not be a problem for large enterprises, the costs can still add up, which could cause bigger companies to go with React Native or Flutter.

Support and ecosystem

When choosing a framework, you should also consider its community support, especially if you’re new to it. This includes forums, documentation, tutorials, etc.

React Native has a pretty good amount of support out there. You can easily find a lot of learning material as well or developers on forums or QA sites like Stack Overflow to ask for support whenever you need any help.

Flutter is still relatively new, so it is yet to build a strong community like React Native. However, Google is investing heavily in it, and therefore it is expected to grow into a robust ecosystem in the future.

For Xamarin, support is quite limited. However, Microsoft provides some free Xamarin courses and learning paths to help you get started.

Conclusion

When choosing a cross-platform development tool, there is no one-size-fits-all option.

All three frameworks have proven successful in building great mobile apps. Your specific needs and preferences determine which framework is best for you.

Currently, Flutter seems to be the most popular option as it excels in terms of performance. So if you’re new to the world of cross-platform development, Flutter might be the way to go for you.

However, you can’t rule React Native and Xamarin out just yet as they still excel in other areas.

For example, if you already have some prior knowledge of JavaScript, then it might be wise to go with React Native.

At the end of the day, it all depends on what you’re building and what you hope to achieve. Any framework will have its pitfalls, but the one where the advantages heavily outweigh those setbacks would probably be the right choice for you.

#Flutter #react-native #Xamarin #mobile-app

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Flutter vs. React Native vs. Xamarin
Autumn Blick

Autumn Blick

1598839687

How native is React Native? | React Native vs Native App Development

If you are undertaking a mobile app development for your start-up or enterprise, you are likely wondering whether to use React Native. As a popular development framework, React Native helps you to develop near-native mobile apps. However, you are probably also wondering how close you can get to a native app by using React Native. How native is React Native?

In the article, we discuss the similarities between native mobile development and development using React Native. We also touch upon where they differ and how to bridge the gaps. Read on.

A brief introduction to React Native

Let’s briefly set the context first. We will briefly touch upon what React Native is and how it differs from earlier hybrid frameworks.

React Native is a popular JavaScript framework that Facebook has created. You can use this open-source framework to code natively rendering Android and iOS mobile apps. You can use it to develop web apps too.

Facebook has developed React Native based on React, its JavaScript library. The first release of React Native came in March 2015. At the time of writing this article, the latest stable release of React Native is 0.62.0, and it was released in March 2020.

Although relatively new, React Native has acquired a high degree of popularity. The “Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019” report identifies it as the 8th most loved framework. Facebook, Walmart, and Bloomberg are some of the top companies that use React Native.

The popularity of React Native comes from its advantages. Some of its advantages are as follows:

  • Performance: It delivers optimal performance.
  • Cross-platform development: You can develop both Android and iOS apps with it. The reuse of code expedites development and reduces costs.
  • UI design: React Native enables you to design simple and responsive UI for your mobile app.
  • 3rd party plugins: This framework supports 3rd party plugins.
  • Developer community: A vibrant community of developers support React Native.

Why React Native is fundamentally different from earlier hybrid frameworks

Are you wondering whether React Native is just another of those hybrid frameworks like Ionic or Cordova? It’s not! React Native is fundamentally different from these earlier hybrid frameworks.

React Native is very close to native. Consider the following aspects as described on the React Native website:

  • Access to many native platforms features: The primitives of React Native render to native platform UI. This means that your React Native app will use many native platform APIs as native apps would do.
  • Near-native user experience: React Native provides several native components, and these are platform agnostic.
  • The ease of accessing native APIs: React Native uses a declarative UI paradigm. This enables React Native to interact easily with native platform APIs since React Native wraps existing native code.

Due to these factors, React Native offers many more advantages compared to those earlier hybrid frameworks. We now review them.

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Destiny Volkman

Destiny Volkman

1597014000

Google's Flutter 1.20 stable announced with new features - Navoki

Flutter Google cross-platform UI framework has released a new version 1.20 stable.

Flutter is Google’s UI framework to make apps for Android, iOS, Web, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Fuchsia OS. Since the last 2 years, the flutter Framework has already achieved popularity among mobile developers to develop Android and iOS apps. In the last few releases, Flutter also added the support of making web applications and desktop applications.

Last month they introduced the support of the Linux desktop app that can be distributed through Canonical Snap Store(Snapcraft), this enables the developers to publish there Linux desktop app for their users and publish on Snap Store.  If you want to learn how to Publish Flutter Desktop app in Snap Store that here is the tutorial.

Flutter 1.20 Framework is built on Google’s made Dart programming language that is a cross-platform language providing native performance, new UI widgets, and other more features for the developer usage.

Here are the few key points of this release:

Performance improvements for Flutter and Dart

In this release, they have got multiple performance improvements in the Dart language itself. A new improvement is to reduce the app size in the release versions of the app. Another performance improvement is to reduce junk in the display of app animation by using the warm-up phase.

sksl_warm-up

If your app is junk information during the first run then the Skia Shading Language shader provides for pre-compilation as part of your app’s build. This can speed it up by more than 2x.

Added a better support of mouse cursors for web and desktop flutter app,. Now many widgets will show cursor on top of them or you can specify the type of supported cursor you want.

Autofill for mobile text fields

Autofill was already supported in native applications now its been added to the Flutter SDK. Now prefilled information stored by your OS can be used for autofill in the application. This feature will be available soon on the flutter web.

flutter_autofill

A new widget for interaction

InteractiveViewer is a new widget design for common interactions in your app like pan, zoom drag and drop for resizing the widget. Informations on this you can check more on this API documentation where you can try this widget on the DartPad. In this release, drag-drop has more features added like you can know precisely where the drop happened and get the position.

Updated Material Slider, RangeSlider, TimePicker, and DatePicker

In this new release, there are many pre-existing widgets that were updated to match the latest material guidelines, these updates include better interaction with Slider and RangeSlider, DatePicker with support for date range and time picker with the new style.

flutter_DatePicker

New pubspec.yaml format

Other than these widget updates there is some update within the project also like in pubspec.yaml file format. If you are a flutter plugin publisher then your old pubspec.yaml  is no longer supported to publish a plugin as the older format does not specify for which platform plugin you are making. All existing plugin will continue to work with flutter apps but you should make a plugin update as soon as possible.

Preview of embedded Dart DevTools in Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio code flutter extension got an update in this release. You get a preview of new features where you can analyze that Dev tools in your coding workspace. Enable this feature in your vs code by _dart.previewEmbeddedDevTools_setting. Dart DevTools menu you can choose your favorite page embed on your code workspace.

Network tracking

The updated the Dev tools comes with the network page that enables network profiling. You can track the timings and other information like status and content type of your** network calls** within your app. You can also monitor gRPC traffic.

Generate type-safe platform channels for platform interop

Pigeon is a command-line tool that will generate types of safe platform channels without adding additional dependencies. With this instead of manually matching method strings on platform channel and serializing arguments, you can invoke native class and pass nonprimitive data objects by directly calling the Dartmethod.

There is still a long list of updates in the new version of Flutter 1.2 that we cannot cover in this blog. You can get more details you can visit the official site to know more. Also, you can subscribe to the Navoki newsletter to get updates on these features and upcoming new updates and lessons. In upcoming new versions, we might see more new features and improvements.

You can get more free Flutter tutorials you can follow these courses:

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hourly developer

hourly developer

1593420654

Hire Dedicated React Native Developer

Have you ever thought of having your own app that runs smoothly over multiple platforms?

React Native is an open-source cross-platform mobile application framework which is a great option to create mobile apps for both Android and iOS. Hire Dedicated React Native Developer from top React Native development company, HourlyDeveloper.io to design a spectacular React Native application for your business.

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WebClues Infotech

WebClues Infotech

1616494982

Hire Dedicated React Native Developers - WebClues Infotech

Being one of the emerging frameworks for app development the need to develop react native apps has increased over the years.

Looking for a react native developer?

Worry not! WebClues infotech offers services to Hire React Native Developers for your app development needs. We at WebClues Infotech offer a wide range of Web & Mobile App Development services based o your business or Startup requirement for Android and iOS apps.

WebClues Infotech also has a flexible method of cost calculation for hiring react native developers such as Hourly, Weekly, or Project Basis.

Want to get your app idea into reality with a react native framework?

Get in touch with us.

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TopDevelopers Co

TopDevelopers Co

1626928787

Factors affecting the cost of hiring a React Native developer in USA - TopDevelopers.co

Want to develop app using React Native? Here are the tips that will help to reduce the cost of react native app development for you.
Cost is a major factor in helping entrepreneurs take decisions about investing in developing an app and the decision to hire react native app developers in USA can prove to be fruitful in the long run. Using react native for app development ensures a wide range of benefits to your business. Understanding your business and working on the aspects to strengthen business processes through a cost-efficient mobile app will be the key to success.

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