1. Preface
In today's mobile application development field, the choice of cross-platform framework has become an important decision for ...
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The AI in the article now supports generating Flutter and React Native from design drafts. Everyone is welcome to try it out at the following address: codia.ai/s/YBF9.
The react native app performs at the same speed as a native application and faster than Flutter. Contrary to misconceptions about React Native relying on a JavaScript bridge, the new React Native Architecture has introduced Direct C++ communication, eliminating the need for JavaScript bridging. Additionally, React Native excels in component customization and reuse. It's worth noting that almost every JavaScript library seamlessly integrates with React Native. In fact, React Native surpasses Flutter in both design and performance.
In comparing React Native with Flutter as cross-platform development frameworks, we must delve into their respective architectures, performance, component customization capabilities, and compatibility with other technologies. The new architecture of React Native you mentioned, which communicates directly with C++, indeed marks a significant improvement by enhancing performance. This improvement reduces the need for JavaScript bridging, potentially addressing some of the performance criticisms that React Native has faced in the past.
This architectural optimization in React Native, especially in terms of achieving performance close to native applications, indeed offers developers greater flexibility and efficiency. Component customization and reusability are another highlight of React Native, coupled with its good compatibility with almost all JavaScript libraries, making the development process smoother and more flexible.
However, when discussing Flutter, we cannot overlook its advantages in providing consistent UI performance, performance, and development experience. Flutter runs on its rendering engine using the Dart language, meaning it can provide consistent UI and high performance across almost all platforms without the need for extensive customization for specific platforms.
When choosing the ultimate cross-platform framework, the deciding factors often involve the specific needs of the project, the skill background of the team, the expected speed of development, performance requirements, and the feasibility of future maintenance. The new architecture of React Native indeed adds new competitiveness to it in the competition with Flutter, but it's also necessary to consider Flutter's efforts in continuously enhancing its performance and development experience.
Welcome to technical exchanges.
A very important aspect in my view for a professional framework is backward compatibility.
I do not want to do a major refactoring of my Apps at every framework release because some beep introduces an interesting but breaking feature and another beepbeep don’t know how to manage development (angular anyone?)
After that comes community support and expressiveness. I’d rather use 10 lines of terse code than 100 lines of boilerplate.
Flutter and React Native adopt different strategies regarding backward compatibility and framework updates, each with its approach to minimizing breaking changes. For instance, Flutter emphasizes compatibility and provides detailed migration guides for major updates. The Flutter team also conducts extensive testing on a large number of packages before releasing updates to reduce breaking changes. On the other hand, React Native boasts a large community and a robust ecosystem, offering a plethora of libraries and tools to manage transitions between versions. The React Native team has been continuously working to improve the upgrade process, making it smoother and reducing breaking changes.
Regarding community support, both frameworks have active communities that contribute to their ecosystems. Flutter's Dart language allows for expressive UI coding, enabling complex UI designs with fewer lines of code. React Native, leveraging the widely used JavaScript language, provides an extensive array of libraries and resources that can help reduce boilerplate through functional and reactive programming paradigms.
It's worth mentioning that Flutter recently updated to version 3.19, integrating with Google's Gemini AI. The latest Gemini supports 1 million tokens.
Thanks a lot for the clarifications happyer. Flutter isn't that bad as you say, although the introduction of the breaking null-safety changes from 1.x to 2.x was a nuisance addressing a non-problem.
The integration with gemini sounds pretty cool and will be something I'd check out. I wonder if you can integrate with a gemini variant that you have RAG'ed yourself?
Best Regards, psimon