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What is Flutter and Why You Should Learn It in 2020

Gaël Thomas on December 12, 2019

What is Flutter? Flutter is a free and open-source mobile UI framework created by Google and released in May 2017. In a few words, this ...
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drdougtheman • Edited

Will Flutter kill React and React.js?

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Paramanantham Harrison

Mmm, the answer is No. React isn’t a library anymore, it’s an ecosystem. It’s very hard to kill react like that.
Flutter is decent and more people from native mobile development experience will adapt it more.
May be flutter win the race with react native in mobile app development. But react as a whole is a very large ecosystem. You can develop for web, desktop, VR, Game and mobile using react. Infact, some large companies like Airbnb design through react in some way.

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Gaël Thomas

I agree with you. React exists for a longer time; this is why the ecosystem is bigger.

But I think Flutter can win the race with the time.
Maybe not on the web site (Flutter Web) because it's really new and perhaps not the heart of the project.

On mobile, I read a lot of articles from developers moving from React Native to Flutter.

Flutter is still entirely new, and maybe with one or two years more, it can be well used in the mobile app development world.

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Paramanantham Harrison

For mobile, yes. Flutter is evolving better with more developers and upto date plugins. React native packages are often outdated

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Aga Kadela • Edited

Thanks for great article. I think about Flutter but i have experience in React so React Native seems to be easiest choice for me( the same JS language). Is Flutter better than React Native? Faster or easier to write? What are the differences? I will be grateful for an answer :)

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Gaël Thomas

In my opinion, Flutter is faster to write than React Native.
I also code in React.js, and I love it. But, I don't really like React Native. I tried a few times, but every time I had problems with NPM packages.

I also love the performance: Flutter doesn't use Javascript like React Native to interact with native components. Dart compiles to native machine code; there is no Javascript structure. So, performance is improved in comparison to React Native.

But, I can understand most of the React.js developers prefer using React Native because it's fast and easy to start when you know React.js.

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Genspirit

Dart, in my opinion, is very easy to pick up from javascript, particularly if you have experience with typescript and OOP. Flutter has a lot of similarities to React as well (A Flutter widget functions similar to a React component).

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Giuseppe Vetri

React Native heavily inspired flutter. Even in the documentation, the creators talk about it. In my case, since I don't know javascript was more easy to learn Dart coming from Java / Kotlin because it's straightforward and it had many similar concepts, but I'm pretty sure that you can catch it quickly if you now Javascript and React. Give it a try :) Since the Flutter Interact event, you can test it in your web browser without having to download anything. dartpad.dev/b6409e10de32b280b8938a...

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103221

Wow, thanks for your explanation! We need popularize Flutter further, I believe in Flutter supremacy :D

I see that you mention the cost-effectiveness of Flutter but you don't mention any numbers. I think it might be useful to mention the overall cost of the Flutter app for those who are not developing apps themselves but rather seek for buying this service. I've seen a brief estimation here surf.dev/what-you-should-know-abou..., they say it is somewhere from $25,000 and $100,000, including design, publication in stores etc

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Giuseppe Vetri

Great Article! 👏

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Gaël Thomas

Thank you for your feedback! I’m happy to see you liked it! 😁

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Antonio Djigo

Nice one, really interested in this technology 👀✨

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Gaël Thomas

Great news, are you going to test this by next year?

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Antonio Djigo

Will try! want to take a step into native apps, seems like a good chance

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Chandu J S

flutter is awesome.

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Tirtha Guha

Ionic and Cordova based applications come with a necessary condition that to create an ipa they have to be built on a Mac. Does flutter take away that weird requirement?

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Gaël Thomas

I'm not sure about your question.

If you mean hybrid applications need to be compiled on a Mac because of licensing (Apple constraints), here it's the same.

Unfortunately, you can't develop for Apple if you don't have a Mac.
It's Apple that creates this constraint.