DEV Community

Cover image for Flutter or Xamarin - Which is Right for Mobile App Development in 2022?
Meenakshi
Meenakshi

Posted on

Flutter or Xamarin - Which is Right for Mobile App Development in 2022?

Mobile application development is becoming popular since more and more businesses are developing their app to push their business into the digital world in 2022. The push is because users are spending more time on their smartphone's mobile apps. Businesses, in this case, have to approach mobile app development companies to explore the possibilities of promoting their business through apps.

Mobile app development companies work with a number of programming languages to build the apps, and two of them are Flutter app development and Xamarin app development in 2022. Both are cross-platform mobile app development toolkits, but entrepreneurs are confused about which one is right for their business.

Let us dig in and answer the query by understanding Flutter and What makes it unique.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is a portable UI toolkit developed by Google to develop cross-platform mobile apps with a single codebase. The toolkit is free and open source for all the developers worldwide, giving it strong popularity throughout the world.
In 2020, Google said that 500,000 developers use Flutter, providing its popularity (Source). But why is Flutter app development unique?

What makes Flutter app development unique?

Flutter is a diverse SDK with loads of features assisting the app developers in creating appealing apps within a less time period. Let us see the advantages Flutter provides, making it so unique for development.

The open-source nature
Beginners look for open-source platforms to learn to code since they cannot maintain the paid version of development tools. What can be better than free Google software for them to learn to build apps. Due to the open-source nature of Flutter, it is very popular among beginners and experts. You can target to develop apps for any industry.

Faster and appealing app development
Flutter app development offers ready-to-use widgets for the developers, and you can customize them according to your requirements, saving ample time for developers. You can build a cross-platform, meaning an app with a single code base for Android and iOS. It costs fewer resources and saves the budget for app development if you are an entrepreneur.
Not only is the development process fast, but Flutter also offers beautiful and flexible UI for users that feel native to them.

Quick debugging and massive support community
Developers debug errors all the time to build an app. Flutter offers a robust set of features like Stateful Hot Reload, speeding up the entire app development process. With the hot reload, app developers can debug the apps without the requirement of reloading the app again and again to see the changes.
And whenever stuck, the app developers are free to use the support of the massive community members ready to solve the issues developers.

Now that we have studied Flutter app development, we have to explore the other entity mentioned at the start of this article before making the final conclusion.

What is Xamarin?

Like Flutter, Xamarin is also a cross-platform mobile app development framework developed by Microsoft. It is preloaded in Visual Studio for Mac and Windows. It promises that developers can do everything with C# and Xamarin app development, which they can do with Java, Kotlin, Objective C, and Swift. Xamarin.Forms provide a shared C# Backend code to android and iOS with a single code base.

What makes Xamarin app development Unique?

Xamarin app development is no doubt a robust development framework. But, let us understand the most important elements that make it a unique cross-platform development toolkit.

Advanced object-oriented language
Xamarin works on C# programming language, an advanced version of C++. The programming language is highly efficient in object orientation, packing the full features of C++ and many more than it.

Highly cross-platform ability with ease of development
Native app developers have to code Android and iOS apps separately. Whereas with Xamarin app development, developers can use 0-80% of the code without any changes in the code. Xamarin uses Xamarin iOS for iOS development and Xamarin. Android for Android development. Developers can choose a single code to be compiled into different formats due to the shared architecture of Xamarin. The UI can also be 100% shared between the platforms.

A wide range of plugins for hardware compatibility issues
Mobile app development does not only refer to smartphones. Mobile app development refers to portable devices meaning that tablets and wearables are also a part of mobile app development as a whole. Xamarin app development offers full hardware support providing a native app development level without any hardware compatibility issues.

The right one for mobile app development?

It is not possible to choose one framework for mobile app development since both are robust and have their own unique points. If your focus is on ease of effort, try Flutter app development because Flutter wins at ease in design parts and debugging. If your focus is on the core part of the application with hardware compatibility and plugins, Xamarin is the right choice for you. But, in the end, it comes down to choice since a number of mobile app development companies are actively targeting both frameworks with equal concentration.

Top comments (0)