Table of Contents
- What’s the difference between a mobile app and a high-performing mobile application?
- React Native
- Ionic
- Flutter
- Key Comparison Between Modern-Day Cross-Platforms App Development: React Native, lonic & Flutter
- Which Framework Stands Out in the Crowd – React Native VS Ionic VS Flutter
What’s the difference between a mobile app and a high-performing mobile application?
Millions of apps dominate the market to transform daily tasks into a mesmerising experience. These super mobile apps have changed the way people think and execute daily chores and activities.
Smartphones and internet penetration have a potential influence on users in building a digitally-powered standard of living. Pepped-up mobile applications are a prerequisite to suffice the potential of your business.
Performance, speed and user experience are crucial aspects of any high-performing mobile application.
To have a better understanding of the best mobile app platforms suitable to your business needs let’s have an apt comparison between React, Ionic and Flutter.
React Native
Well supported by Facebook, React Native is a Mobile App Development tool used to create Cross-Platform Apps on iOS, Android, and UWP platforms. Initially released in 2015, react native is a promising technology for cross-platform app development. The working principles of React Native are very basic- you write a code in JavaScript interacting with native components of a particular operating system.
React Native Advantages
● Code Reusability: This is one of the vital benefits concerning React Native. About 95% of code reuse rate speeds up the development process and reduces costs.
● Performance: Apps built using React Native are brilliant against Ionic.
● User Interface: React Native’s user interface goes parallel with native products using platform-specific UI building blocks. Hence, you obtain an enhanced user experience irrespective of the platform or device.
● Live Reload: This feature enables you to see and work with real-time changes. You can make fixes in the code while loading the app if needed. It further allows you to reload a particular section requiring a change to save compilation time.
● Cost-Efficiency: Owing to its code reusability nature, react Native helps you save development costs by nearly 40%. There’s no need to hire two dev teams to create the application.
● Third-Party Plugins: Recreating an app will be an expensive barter. Hence, React Native delivers third-party plugin options encompassing JavaScript and native modules. These plugins remove the hassle of web view functions thereby improving the app’s functionality and performance.
● Immense Community Support: React Native is a response to the need of the developers’ community. It has a community approach of about 50,000 active contributors. Backed up by Facebook, React Native is constantly developed and updated.
Ionic
Introduced in 2013, Ionic is an open-source SDK cross-platform app development. Due to its access to several different technologies like HTML, CSS and SaaS, creating cross-platform mobile apps is easy with Ionic.
Advantages:
● It’s less time-consuming when operating with native languages. With a plethora of native UI components and other features such as interactive paradigms, mobile components and typography, the development cycle becomes relatively shorter.
● The framework and technologies under the Ionic’s roof are easy for engineers to grasp.
● Fast prototyping is handy with Ionic due to the preset templates.
Flutter
Younger than React Native, Flutter is developed using Dart as a programing language. Apps built using Flutter lack UI components but rather include building blocks termed Widgets. They can be either stateless or stateful, also there’s no link between the view and the codebase as in React Native. The UI components in Flutter are supposed to be rendered on the Skia graphics engine.
Advantages:
● Lack of viaduct concerning view and code accelerates the app responsiveness.
● Widgets are rendered if required resembling a declarative approach as in React.
● Stateful Hot Reloading avails an instant update of changes. There’s no need to restart or rebuild the widget tree.
● Both AOT and JIT compilation is Dart supportive of improving app startup time and performance.
Key Comparison Between Modern-Day Cross-Platforms App Development: React Native, Ionic & Flutter
| React Native | Ionic | Flutter | |
| Components | React Native’s code reusability nature complies directly with the native platform. You acquire a consistent look and feel. This structure delivers the speed, functionality and speed of a native app. | Being a hybrid development framework, Ionic uses PhoneGap or Cordova to regenerate native components | Flutter uses widgets as building blocks and lacks native controls and components. These widgets include UI controls such as text, media, buttons, elements, etc. All these can be implemented in the graphics engine. |
| UserInterface | React Native modules associated with native UI controllers, which give amazing user experience that is very close to native apps | Ionic doesn’t utilize native elements for UI and renders everything in HTML and CSS. Then it applies Cordova to give native mobile experience. | Flutter provides the best User Interfaces. |
| Rendering | React Native functioning power is the best when writing apps in JavaScript. React’s rendering features using native components respond well even if written in other languages like HTML and CSS. Real-time rendering devoid of recompilation or rebuilding needs with instant results. CHEERS to the Live Reload feature! | Ionic enable instant feedback, credit goes to the instant previews of your app on mobile devices. Instant refreshes are handy! | Written in C++ using Skia graphics, Flutter renders widgets straight away in the engine without using OEM widgets, resulting in a dynamic and smooth UI experience. A feature that cannot be obtained from other cross-platform solutions. Additionally; widgets rendering is performed declaratively when the state is changed. A perfect resemblance to Virtual DOM works similar to React Native |
| Platform Adaptability | React works on platform-specific logic and frameworks. Hence, it can adapt features from one platform to another. | Ionic adjust features to make cross-platform app development an unwrinkled experience. Hence, you can write an app at once and run it anywhere with the least modifications. | Flutter’s widgets implement material design notions. Concerning iOS design, developers can use Cupertino widgets. These building blocks enable engineers to boost the chain and render the UI on both mobile platforms respectively. |
| Language Pyramid | React Native uses Javascript code that mirrors HTML, but it isn’t. It’s referred to as JSX, which most developers are comfortable using | A JavaScript framework, Ionic is developed using Angular. Which uses HTML templates for its views. Logic and views depart when building apps in Ionic. This makes cross-platform app development effortless with Ionic as the underlying framework is the same. | Based on Dart, Flutter is developed using a relatively young programming language. Dart acts following the binary code. Hence, you can attain native performance. |
| Device Testing | React display modification results as you make them. It also serves the platter of debugging tools to save time when fixing defects and issues within an application. | Ionic delivers instant previews on smartphones and browsers. Additionally, any change leads to instant refreshes. | The built-in support feature allows Flutter both logic and widget testing. |
| Community | React Native is the king when it comes to market and community recognition | Ionic has huge community support, as well as a great marketplace where you can find a lot of starters and templates to jump-start any app | Flutter is on the verge of gaining popularity and its community size is gaining momentum. However, it still has a long way to go against React Native. |
| Popularity | React Native is more popular as compared to the other two since many tech giants rely on it including Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Skype, Tesla, Uber, Walmart, Vogue, Salesforce, etc. | Ionic scores are good among mobile and web app developers, thanks to the easy learning curve. It is preferred by MarketWatch, Pacifica, Sworkit, Nationwide, etc. | Being a new entrant, Flutter has grown in popularity. It’s a choice of Alibaba, Hamilton Musical, Greentea, Google Ads, etc. |
| Pricing | Completely open-source frameworks. Developers can utilize this system and their libraries for free. | It is a free open-source framework for developing cross-platform mobile applications. But, the organization offers its Pro Development Environment which is paid. | Fully open-source frameworks. Developers can utilize this system and their libraries for free. |
| Performance | React Native is made for performance. It gives very similar to native applications experience as it renders code elements specifically to the native APIs. Additionally, React allow developers to use native modules written in native languages to write code for complicated operations | When it comes to performance, Ionic loses the game. Its performance isn’t as similar to React Native or flutter, since it uses web technologies to render the application, which significantly decreases the speed. Moreover, it doesn’t utilize native components but tries to create a native look and feel by using web technologies. | Flutter uses of Dart and there is no JavaScript bridge for starting interactions with the device’s native components. Hence the speed flutter offers is amazing. |
Which Framework Stands Out in the Crowd – React Native VS Ionic VS Flutter
There is no clear-cut winner here. The platform you decide on for mobile app development depends on personal and team preference. The result should be that you have a successful business. Businesses seeking native apps can rely upon React Native. It’s efficient, thanks to native rendering, driving apps smoother and responsive to the end-users. Besides, it’s less time-consuming.
Time and budget is the leading reason that companies prefer hybrid application development platforms. While they can go wrong for the time spared on fixing bugs and issues. The frequency of such issues is less in apps developed using React Native.
