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Hi I want to check out a new framework to develop an app. Now I'm wondering about which one to choose, for example React Native or Flutter. Can you give me some suggestions or experiences about what to choose and maybe their advantages or disadvantages?
Thanks!
Summary:
React uses JS, Flutter uses Dart
The learning curve for Flutter is pretty steep since if you don't already know Dart, you're going to have to learn that too as well as a new framework (and reactive programming).
For React Native, it's pretty easy to pick up if you have used React or just JS in general which I'm sure you have.
Architecture
Flutter tends to rely on the BLoC pattern which is endorsed by Google Developers.
React Native relies on Flux and Redux.
Ecosystem
Flutter came out in May 2017 so it has less of an ecosystem than React Native which came out two full years prior.
Compilation
Flutter compiles to device-native code which you can change when you create a Flutter project. All of this is done on one thread! For intensive works, you might want to use a Dart Isolate which spins up a new spot on the memory to do intensive works while Flutter works on the UI and other stuff. Dart is designed for asynchronous workloads. Dart has Streams and Futures (basically Promises in JS). You can use a package that essentially brings in Redux to Dart to allow for Observables (better Promises).
React Native does not compile to native-device code and instead compiles to device equivalent. The JS runs on a separate thread and communicates to UI components through bridges. For asynchronous workloads, you can use Promises like in JS.
Documentation
As far as documentation goes, React Native wins at being more user-friendly than Flutter. Although, Flutter does have what they call cookbooks with easy to follow along with code samples. Overall, this is up to you.
Cross Platform
Flutter allows you to make apps for way more devices than React Native can. React Native is only for Android & iOS (though you can make web apps with react-native-web, thanks #VilleKoo) while Flutter hopes to support desktop, and web apps as well as the aforementioned iOS & Android all from a single codebase which is pretty impressive. Keep in mind, web support is in beta and desktop apps are not stable at this moment in time.
Further reading:
https://nevercode.io/blog/flutter-vs-react-native-a-developers-perspective/
https://hackr.io/blog/react-native-vs-flutter
https://hackernoon.com/react-native-vs-flutter-which-is-preferred-for-you-bba108f808
I see that the technical side of the question is covered pretty well by the others, but it's worth having a look at this issue from the standpoint of the technology's popularity, community support, and how it will keep up in the long run. Here is what I've found:
The category of most loved technologies due to the StackOverflow statistics shows how many specialists began using a particular tool and would like to continue working with it. By this criterion, Flutter’s score is 68.17%, while React Native has 58.08% of voices. Github says that the number of open source projects is growing day by day. The statistics present the number of contributors to open-source projects. React Native has 9.1k contributors, while this number for Flutter reaches 13k. Google Trends is a metric that shows how often a particular query is entered into the search in relation to the overall search volume for a specific period. It means that it estimates a query as a percentage of all search queries in Google. We can see that Flutter’s popularity amounted to nearly twice the React Native. The average number of “Flutter” queries score is 86, while React Native takes 58. With Google Trends, we can also analyze how popular other hybrid frameworks are compared to the described two. The statistics have shown us that Flutter is the best hybrid app framework in 2020, and React Native is in second place. Interestingly, if we take the 5 years’ overview instead of 12 months, we can see the whole picture. The trend for Flutter has rapidly grown in the last 3 years’ time. The popularity of React Native and Cordova was stable, and Xamarin’s number of queries is steadily decreasing.
So as you see Flutter gains popularity very quickly, and I am rather surprised how quick it is. It looks like Flutter might be more future-proof because of the wider community, more new modules, and features, which result in better support, more updates, etc.
Here is some additional reading for you on that matter:
StackOverflow statistics 2021
Flutter vs React Native: Which is better?
Statistics about other frameworks' popularity
Related
i am react native developer , and my question is more generic than code
i am getting really frustrated with react native and the amount of bugs it has
and the extremely low performance on android devices specially the old ones
almost all of the important api are third party developed on github and they not maintained anymore with alot of bugs.
some codes doesn't work sometimes,
what i noticed with highly used(10k+ users) application in react native
on some android devices fetch request is repeated 4 times.
on some android devices async-storage is working probably .
on await and async are getting ignored
React.usestate is buggy and it is ignored sometimes
does flutter offer a better environment with less bugs
Speaking from personal experience, flutter is better than react native for several reasons, but I'll list the few best ones here:-
More interactice community :- Flutter has way more answered question in the past 2 years on stackoverflow than react
Better docs - The flutter docs cover everything, I mean everything\
Nativeness - Flutter does a great job at making the app look as native to the platform as possible
Wide range of packages - Like it says, there is a package for everything, You can also use platform views just in case there is something on the native side you want to add so there are no limits
The editors - OMg I cannot say how much easier it is with good descriptions of all the commands within the code. I mean you can hover on a function and if made by the flutter team or a proper package team, you'll see the full implementation
Rid of any form of html or css - The designing, is much much much much much * infinity easier because everything makes just more sense from a programmer's poin t of view
Great debugging - With flutter, you can debug on different scales, even on the release scale just in case there is a problem with release mode instead of debug mode and ofcourse the community is always there to help
Regular awesome updates - While react is slowly dying down on new features, flutter is booming. With the recent update to flutter 2.0 introducing null safety, the chance of bugs have gone down even more
So yes, I recommend you try to shift to flutter. There is even a full tutorial in the flutter docs for react-native decs to learn flutter.
With the release of tfjs-react-native and the ample support for the platform, is React Native stable and reliable enough for a startup to go all-in on to build cross-platform Machine Learning apps?
Note: We are building a Health-Tech app that uses dietary and physiological data to recommend exercise plans and meal options for optimal health. The most resource-intensive task the app would likely perform is to use open-pose like models to improve exercise posture.
From AirBnB's blog, they moved away from React Native because they had to maintain 3 different codebases as they had started with native development. We are just about starting and have experience with React but are open to considering others like Flutter.
I think you're asking two different questions, you can use tensorflow-js in any js framework. If you want my opinion: go with React, there's simply more documentation on using tensorflow with React, and you already have experience with it. Just don't start developing three different codebases, that's not a matter of React/TF vs Flutter/TF, it's a matter of organisation.
This is not a technical question.
It just this is my first programming language which I am fluent and I don't want to abandon it. But I feel frustrated, I need to know about this framework, but should I learn something that will change in just a couple more weeks.
News:
https://adtmag.com/articles/2018/07/10/abandon-react-native.aspx
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/26/node_native_developers/
Few things from my perspective: Airbnb was supporting React Native since 2016, and recently they announced sunsetting React Native and reinvesting all of their efforts back into native because they weren’t able to achieve their specific goals. The reason why AirBnB is moving away from React Native is very specific to Airbnb. They already have a huge number of IOS & Android Developers and feel their application needs are pretty unconventional. They end up developing for 3 platforms instead of 2. Which means their entire application is not in React Native, only a few features are in React Native.
Read these articles: https://medium.com/braus-blog/airbnb-is-dropping-react-js-should-you-too-dcbff36def5c and Here goes what worked well and what didn’t : https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at-airbnb-the-technology-dafd0b43838 . And one head's up from the RN team after the .56 version release is "
We're working on a large-scale rearchitecture of React Native to make
the framework more flexible and integrate better with native
infrastructure in hybrid JavaScript/native apps. With this project,
we'll apply what we've learned over the last 5 years and incrementally
bring our architecture to a more modern one. We're rewriting many of
React Native's internals, but most of the changes are under the hood:
existing React Native apps will continue to work with few or no
changes."
Facebook has not stopped supporting React, and there are still a lot of contributors supporting and using React Native in the community. Moving away from technology depends on what are the other alternatives you have.
I'm working on a new project for a Fintech company and I have been tasked with looking into whether we should go with React Native or native Swift/Objective-C/Java for our mobile app development technology and strategy going forward.
I have done loads of research into this and have read many of the case studies relating to React Native, but I still don't feel I have enough to make an informed decision at this point.
The broad app functionality will include things like:
Data related functions such as Account Balances and Statements (pretty simple)
Image capture of identity documents and selfies of the users
Capture of biometric data
Push notifications
Some of this is pretty standard and simple, but some of it will require the app to use low level device functions and/or use 3rd party Android and iOS SDKs.
So, in terms of working towards the decision of a mobile development strategy, can I ask you for your input, based on your recent experience, on reasons to consider React Native over native Swift/Objective-C/Java development in the light of the planned functionality listed above (including reasons why it may be far better to stick with the native languages/platforms).
From own experience I can tell that React Native is a good choice for most of the apps when you need to develop and iterate fast. It usually means it would be cheaper to develop for a customer.
Looking at the list of features I can not see anything that can not be done in RN. Sooner or later you'll have to dive into native code, usually to bridge native modules with JS. I've done this multiple times, it's not that hard and documentation on RN website helps a lot.
Be aware that you'll most certainly run into stupid bugs and you'll have to find workaround. At least this happened to me multiple times when I was building RN app half a year ago, maybe now it's more stable.
Also I believe it really depends on what are the devices of potential app users. I've never developed for Android, but heard from fellow developers, that on mid-level Android devices RN runs much slower, this should be tested from the very beginning.
React Native has a really nice and tempting idea behind sounds like "unified and almost fully shareable codebase for different platforms including Web". But from my experience (not so extensive but still) the reality is a little bit different – at some point you will face some issues with native code for sure, and it would be really good if you have experienced Swift/Objective-C/Java developers in your team to deal with it. Don't trust the promises "all you need is just a React Front-End Developer". The React Native platform itself seemed to me more like a magical blackbox which I ran with a single command having no any idea what's inside and how it actually works. You have to know at least something about Xcode and Android Emulator even if Facebook is trying to hide this aspect it from you as much as they can.
TL;DR In my opinion if you really want to try React Native for something more complex than TodoMVC then you need to have at least 3 developers: Web (JavaScript/React), iOS (Swift/Objective-C) and Android (Java). Or just one Superhero.
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With the recent updates to Sencha Touch, it's looking more and more like a native app for iPhone and even iPad. There are still many differences and the documentation is a little lacking at the moment.
My question is, given that I am already fully capable of creating native app in Objective C, should I switch to Sencha Touch and PhoneGap, or start integrating those tools?
What are the pros and cons?
EDIT:
Thanks for the insightful points. One of my partners wrote up their opinion over the weekend with some ideas that haven't been mentioned here: Web vs Native: How Should You Write Your App?
Pros:
Easier to port to other platforms.
You can distribute outside the App Store if the app doesn't require any native APIs.
Cons:
Scrolling still doesn't feel quite right with any of the web-based touch frameworks.
Slower (hardware-accelerated CSS animations help, but it's not nearly as flexible as Core Animation).
Lacks full access to native hardware and OS-integration (PhoneGap provides some, but not everything), such as:
Push notifications.
Local notifications.
Background location updates (including significant location monitoring).
This is debatable, but in my opinion Cocoa Touch is easier to develop in than JavaScript + Sencha/XUI/etc.
Questions leading to your own answer:
Do you need the raw performance of a native ARM app? Or do you need an API that's only available to Objective C? (For instance, for real-time audio synthesis, etc.) Do you want to use Apple's latest APIs without waiting for some tool or library vendor?
Do you mind that your javascript source code in visible unencrypted inside every customer's .ipa file?
Or do you want to easily port a simpler app cross-platform?
Pros: None
Cons: It will never be as native as a
native app. And you depend on an API
that isn't yours, eg. all your apps
will be useless once they stop
maintaining their API.
However, if you were unexperienced and only needed to make a App for a short event (upcoming movie promotion, etc), this would be perfect as it would save you time. But well, if you want a App with a longer lifecycle, go native.
Forget the details of comparing these frameworks to native apps, native will always win. If your app needs to run on "multiple" platforms, then you are better off using PhoneGap and a javascript framework. These frameworks are going to take awhile to mature, so you'll have to figure out if you can get by on what they offer now. PhoneGap is also open source, so if there is something native that you want to expose, contribute to the project.