React Native – Talent500 Blog

Flutter Vs React Native for developing cross platform applications

Posted on November 16, 2022July 11, 2023 by nemo job

Mobile applications are becoming a phenomenal success in the modern world and therefore, many IT organizations are working on developing highly-efficient mobile apps.

With over 3.6 million mobile users globally, the mobile app development demands innovative solutions that are time-efficient and require less effort. In 2022, there will be two fundamental hybrid frameworks for app development frameworks – Google’s Flutter and Meta’s React Native.

And both these frameworks are enjoying a high wave of popularity. Given the incredible supportive features of these two frameworks, one question keeps floating in the app development realm: which one is the best framework for mobile app development – Flutter or React Native?

This blog aims to give more clarity to developers about which framework is the best suited for mobile app development.

Without any further ado! Let’s get started!

What Is Flutter Framework?

Google’s official brainchild, Flutter, is a cross-platform UI toolkit for developing robust, beautiful, native-complied applications. This platform can power various platforms web, desktop, and mobile applications.

Launched in May 2017, the popularity of the Flutter framework has grown immensely over the years. One of the most attractive features of Flutter is that it allows cross-platform application development using a single codebase. With a conventional app development ecosystem, a company would need several tools and an intricate team of developers to create an application that would run on the web, mobile, and desktop.

For example, with traditional, you might require:

A developer with web development expertise using React to develop the website
Another developer developing a desktop version using C# and Java
For mobile applications (iOS and Android) development, a dedicated mobile developer utilizing native frameworks such as Kotlin and Swift
This traditional approach would require a complex collaboration between a team of expert app engineers and surely a ton of meetings to ensure consistency is maintained across all platforms.
And you can’t skip the elaborate testing and addressing bugs individually for each platform.

Flutter eliminates all these complexities. Companies can easily hire one qualified Flutter developer to develop apps across multiple platforms with just a single codebase to manage.

While Flutter offers several benefits, time and resource efficiency for launching and maintaining an application remains the shining star.

Now that we know what Flutter framework is, let’s focus on an interesting fact about the framework:

Almost 2 mil developers trust and use Flutter for cross-platform app development. 500,000 developers use it monthly!

When to Use Flutter?

Flutter can be extremely beneficial in the following situations:

Small budget projects
Applications with short development and quick delivery timeline
Creating UI-centered apps
Iteration (Hot Reload)

Benefits of using Flutter framework for app development

Flutter framework for mobile application development comes with several advantages, including:

Flutter is platform-agnostic
Flutter simplifies and speeds application development
Flutter is simple to grasp and easy to use
Flutter scales well
Flutter apps offer an excellent user experience

That’s a comprehensive overview of the Flutter framework. Now let’s take a look at React Native.

What Is React Native?

Meta’s official cross-platform framework, React Native, is supported by a codebase in JavaScript programming language, making it fairly simple to use for cross-platform application development. Therefore, JavaScript developers get a low barrier to entry in the mobile application development realm.

Web development isn’t a new or unexplored paradigm. It’s a technical development discipline that has existed for many years. Most web engineers have significant experience in using JavaScript for much of their careers.

However, mobile development is relatively new. In fact, the mobile app development ecosystem has witnessed popularity and growth only over the past few years. Therefore, if developers are already experts in JavaScript, the learning curve for robust mobile app development using Meta’s React Native becomes relatively easy.

Industry leaders such as Xbox Store apps are trusting the React Native platform for their mobile application requirements. Similar to Flutter, React Native enables cross-platform app development using a single codebase.

When Should You Use React Native?

React Native framework can be worthwhile to explore in the following situation:

An application requiring flexible and custom design without losing consistency on cross-platform interfaces.
When you need both web and mobile applications, React Native allows code sharing between web and mobile interfaces.
When your development team has gained extensive expertise in JavaScript

Benefits of React Native:

Meta’s official app development platform presents a treasure trove of benefits, including:

Extensive base packages since it uses the immensely popular JavaScript language
Similar to Flutter, a single codebase enables developers to engineer an app for multiple interfaces simultaneously rather than individually.
Extends significant developer freedom and flexibility as it allows code reuse and cost-saving
An active and vast community supporting the framework
Easy learning curve for React developers

Both React Native and Flutter are cross-platform app development frameworks. So what’s the difference? Let’s find out!

React Native Vs. Flutter

React Native and Flutter are the most preferred app development tools. However, both these frameworks have their own set of advantages and drawbacks. The table below represents the differences between the two platforms.

Parameters	Flutter	React Native
Parent Company	Launched by Google	Launched by Meta (formerly Facebook)
Launched on	May 2017	June 2015
Backend Programming Language	Dart language	JavaScript
Architecture	Business Logic Component (BLoC)	Flux and Redux architecture. Facebook engineered Flux. Redux is the preference among the React Native community.
User Interface	Leverages custom widgets to engineer the application user-interface	Leverages native UI controllers to engineer the application user-interface
Documentation Support	Presents well-structured and elaborate documentation. Developers can access all required information in one single place.	Presents user-friendly but unstructured documentation
Performance	Delivers fast-performing applications, and enables application compilation by using the arm C/C++ library making it more aligned to machine code and empowering better native app performance	Comparatively, app performance is slow. With React, developers sometimes face certain problems while executing the hybrid application framework.
Testing	Presents an ensemble of testing features allowing developers to perform several types of testing including unit, integration, as well as widget testing	Leverages third-party application testing tools
Community Support	Comparatively less community support since it’s relatively new	Backed by very strong community support providing quick resolution to queries and concerns
Industry Adoption	Google Ads eBay Hamilton Alibaba BMW	Facebook LinkedIn Tesla Instagram Coinbase Skype
Learning Curve	Comparatively, easier to learn and more developer-friendly. Dart programming language is much simpler to work with and understand compared to JavaScript. Dart also has striking similarities with programming languages used for native mobile app development.	JavaScript, on the hand, is far from being a developer-friendly programming language. For developers without experience in working with JavaScript, using React Native can be a challenging task presenting unnecessarily complicated coding. However, it’s an easy task for JavaScript experienced developer to use React Native.
Debugging	Enables easy debugging with tools that support development in both Android Studio and Visual Studio. DevTools and OEM Debugger help developers identify and comprehend errors. Also supported by Inspector, which allows checking the visual layer of the app and clearly answers why it looks the way it looks	Debugging can be slightly problematic in the React Native framework, especially when a particular exception or error originates in the native part of the application. However, Flipper (debugger) has efficiently addressed the problem of debugging for React Native.

Which One Should You Choose?

The latest research from Statista in 2021 reveals the popularity of both the app development framework. Flutter leads the graph for cross-platform mobile development framework in 2021. The Google brainchild surpassed React Native by 4% (42% for Flutter framework against 38% for React Native).

Image source: Cross-platform mobile frameworks popularity among software developers worldwide from 2019 to 2021 (Statista)

Still, it’s only fair to say that two frameworks are almost equally popular in the development realm compared to other similar platforms. Both Flutter and React have their benefits and drawbacks. The correct selection should be based on your experience and the individual app development goals and requirements of your project.

If you are already experienced in JavaScript, writing mobile apps codebase in React Native is a simple job. However, if you’re more interested in better performance, enhanced stability, and a more cohesive environment between different ecosystems, Flutter is worth exploring.

4 great examples of React Native apps in the market

Posted on October 3, 2022October 3, 2022 by vallish

React Native is the leading JavaScript framework for creating native iOS and Android apps. Based on Facebook’s React library, JavaScript developers are given the freedom to develop a native for both platforms with a single code base. React Native is the world’s second most widely used framework for app development. Many companies have shown what can be achieved with this framework.

This article will list some top React Native apps that deliver excellent services to end users and drive company profits.

Let’s get started.

1. Instagram

Instagram is the most downloaded app on the Google Play Store and App Store. It is developed in React Native and uses the same code for Android and iOS operating systems. The app essentially has three components – Feed, Explore, and Profile. With over a billion downloads and multi-billion users worldwide, it is astonishing to know that Instagram was built entirely with a handful of developers in under nine months. Such is the efficiency and scope of React Native. But today, it is not such a surprising feat anymore as some companies have developed their apps in shorter duration.

React Native is exceptionally scalable; that’s how Instagram can handle 500 million daily active users. Also, the app takes 1 billion daily searches, more than Bing, Google, and Yahoo combined. Without a doubt, Instagram is a live example of what can be achieved by leveraging the features of React Native for app development.

2. Shopify

Shopify’s leading eCommerce SaaS platform uses React Native framework for its iOS and Android applications. The engineering team at Shopify recognized the framework’s potential early on and created multiple apps for their retail customers based on React Native.

Shopify refuses to convert its native app into a React Native application because it lacks first-class Android support.

Shopify uses React Native for three applications: Arrive, Point of Sale, and Compass. Shopify could maintain smaller teams for the three applications, as over 80% of the code was shared between Android and iOS versions of the applications. Also, engineering teams could maintain a lower CPU threshold for the applications using React Native, which makes these apps faster. Shopify is actively using React Native to build high-performing applications to meet the requirements of retail merchants.

3. UberEats

UberEats is a highly popular application that lets you order food from restaurants in the nearby area. It tracks your order in real time while it is delivered to you. After delivery, you can rate the driver and food quality. The app is built using React Native for the front end, while it uses multiple platforms for the backend services.

With over 11 million downloads, UberEats is highly rated for customer experience among restaurant delivery apps. UberEats’ engineering team was not confident about using any 3rd party tools for creating apps that could expose them to bad user experience and delayed updates. They chose React Native as Facebook engineers, and the open-source community supports it. Also, React Native is easy to add to any platform that further extends its scope.

4. Skype

Nobody needs an introduction to Skype. Being one of the most popular VOIP calling applications, it was the leader before other web apps started supporting internet calling. Skype mobile app is built using React Native and has over 1 billion downloads. The success of Skype’s consistent experience with both Android and iOS is driven by the cross-platform compatibility of React Native framework. Again, it has witnessed great success due to the framework’s scalability. The Skype app has to handle 25 million users making calls every day. On average, there are 300 minutes of video and voice calling per second on Skype,

Skype needed a robust framework that could drive the success of its applications across both mobile platforms without the need to maintain separate code bases. React Native was the obvious answer as it has a proven record of empowering scalable enterprise-level app development.

Conclusion

You don’t need too many developers to create apps with this framework. As you can use the same code for both Android and iOS apps, you don’t need native developers. It also supports JavaScript out-of-the-box, which implies it can easily integrate with any existing backend service. Furthermore, with React Native, you don’t have to wait for an app to be built and installed on an app for testing; the framework provides instant feedback as compared to other mobile SDKs. These are some reasons why you should consider React Native for your next app development project.

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React Native developer toolkit: In-demand skills, learning resources, online courses, interview prep, books & more

Posted on October 3, 2022 by vallish

React Native is a JavaScript-based development framework created by Facebook to allow developers to use React to create Android and iOS app interfaces. Released in 2015, the framework is now one of the most popular cross-platform mobile frameworks, according to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2021. React Native has mass adoption for mobile application development because it allows JavaScript codebase to be compiled within the mobile application. This is similar to a native iOS app built using Objective-C or a native Android app built using Java.

As an open-source, cross-platform, and easy-to-learn framework, mobile development companies prefer React Native. Also, the development time is shorter when developers use React Native.

We created this React Native developer toolkit to give learners and aspiring developers a reference list to access the best resources to get started.

In-depth knowledge of JavaScript

React Native is entirely based on JavaScript. Excellent knowledge and understanding of JavaScript programming language and libraries are mandatory for React Native developers. As JavaScript is the inevitable part of cross-platform app development, your potential as a candidate will be evaluated based on your understanding of this programming language. You must understand how JavaScript components are built and how application logic and services are structured.

Familiarity with React assumptions

React allows several features to make it faster. Assumptions or React Reconciliation is one process that makes the code execute more quickly. The concepts like Virtual DOM, JSX, and component lifecycle are important for React Native developers to understand. Interview questions are often based on React assumptions.

Familiarity with frequently used tools

While you won’t be expected to know everything about mobile application development, as a React Native developer, there are some tools you must be familiar with. These tools are often used to accelerate the app development process. The most essential React Native development tools you must be familiar with include:

Redux: An open-source JavaScript library frequently used to manage the application’s global state.

Sentry error tracking: For real-time monitoring and efficiently fixing crashes.

ESLint: Frequently used JavaScript code linter to ensure code is written in a clear and standard format compliant with JavaScript patterns.

Jest: A zero-configuration framework for testing JS code used within a mobile application.

React Native Testing Library: React Native testing utilities are often used in mobile application development to encourage good testing practices.

React Native Developer Technical Interview Questions

Official resources

React Native website

Official documentation

React Native official blog

React Native on GitHub

React Native on Twitter

Online courses and tutorials for React Native developers

The Complete React Native and Hooks Course

An Udemy beginner’s course helps developers get familiar with the essential concepts of React Native and start building app interfaces quickly. Apart from the core concepts of the React Native framework, this course also teaches Hooks, Context, and React Navigation. In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of React, including JSX, props, state, and event handling. Finally, you will build and deploy the prototypes of your applications and learn how to publish them to Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

Complete React Native Developer in 2022: Zero to Mastery

ZTM Academy offers this quality course for learning React Native for beginners and developers. An updated course with the latest inclusions about new features and updates. The course material is based on the latest version of React Native and focuses on efficiency. You will not have to struggle to comb through outdated or incomplete tutorials. This one is a complete course to learn how to build professional and modern Android and iPhone (iOS) apps with React Native.

One of the benefits of this course is that it teaches practically by building a massive restaurant application using React, Firebase, React Hooks, Expo, React Navigation, Google Maps/Places API, Styled-Components, React Animations, and more.

CS50’s Mobile App Development with React Native

Another React Native online course is CS50’s Mobile App Development with React Native course made available by Harvard University on Edx. This course is a continuation of Harvard’s popular CS50 computer science course. It teaches accelerated mobile application development using React Native. It also explains the concept of cross-platform applications and how native apps can be built with JavaScript without Swift or Java.

React Native Express

This is the right resource if you are an experienced developer who wants to experiment with React Native for cross-platform mobile app development. React Native Express covers everything you want to know about the programming language to get started. Professional developers often use this guide and the official React Native documentation to build apps. It covers the fundamentals of JavaScript and essential React Native libraries that are not explained in the official documentation.

Communication: Developers work with engineers and stakeholders, so communication is integral to their job. Impeccable communication skills are required to share the progress of the projects, solve problems, and help teammates. Software developers need active listening, interpersonal communication, and public speaking skills.

Creativity: Mobile application interfaces are a communication medium. Creativity is vital for React Native developers to design interfaces that attract users and provide a satisfactory experience. If you are creative, you can build apps that stand out among competitors. Here are some tips to boost creativity as a front-end developer.

Problem-solving: This skill allows software developers to quickly identify and fix technical errors. Problem-solving skills will enable you to analyze your work and devise helpful solutions. The faster you can identify the issue, the sooner you can deploy the solution and keep the application’s performance high.

Learn more about essential software developer soft skills with these resources:

How soft skills transitioned to become the new power skills

6 soft skills that still impress employers in 2022

5 tips for presenting new ideas as a software developer

5 Time management tips for software developers

4 Productivity hacks for software developers

Conclusion

React Native is an excellent platform for developing cross-platform mobile application interfaces. As it uses native GUI components, it is also the fastest framework to work with for application development. This ultimate React Native developer toolkit is a complete reference guide for learning resources and interview preparation.

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Why should you develop mobile apps with React Native?

Posted on September 19, 2022 by vallish

Today’s digital arena is driven by rapid development and faster information delivery. Every mobile user expects to get a service or information at the swipe of a finger. That’s why almost every business tries hard to provide the best mobile experience to its target audience.

This unprecedented demand for quality mobile experience has facilitated the evolution and development of many mobile application frameworks.

Among these, React Native is one of the most popular mobile app development frameworks. It is open source and made by Facebook in 2013, today, React Native has control over 38% of the mobile app development market.

We can build mobile apps for both Android and iOS with this app development framework. This capability gives businesses the economic benefits of maintaining a single code base for both versions of their apps.

Here we explore why you should develop mobile apps with React Native, but first, let’s take an overview of this framework.

An overview of React Native

Reactive Native is an open-source framework based on JavaScript. The framework follows a set of declarative programming paradigms for building native mobile applications for Android and iOS platforms.

One of the contributing factors to the popularity of Reactive Native is that Facebook successfully merged the best parts of native development and React (the top-level JavaScript library they created) in this framework. As it uses JavaScript as the core programming language for building applications, it reduces development time and improves the application’s performance across platforms.

App developers are no longer restricted to Swift/Objective C for iOS development or Java for Android applications. React Native helps them overcome these requirements and create fully functional cross-platform applications.

From a business perspective, it is much more cost-efficient to develop applications with Reactive Native as a single code base needs to be created and maintained. There is no need to hire two teams of developers.

Reasons to use React Native for app development

1. Code reusability

Single code base results in code reusability to create applications for both Android and iOS platforms. As React Native uses JavaScript, the capability to reuse the same code increases. It results in efficiency and faster delivery of the product. It also results in significant cost reduction.

React Native also benefits from the availability of hundreds of open-source JavaScript libraries that can be used to create user interfaces for mobile applications. This considerably speeds up the development process. Companies can accelerate the app development process by creating reusable code modules that they can use between multiple mobile applications.

2. Easy availability of JavaScript resources

JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages used in almost every web development project. React Native uses JavaScript, so you do not need additional developers to work on mobile applications. Furthermore, hundreds and thousands of open-source JavaScript libraries allow adding features to applications quickly without writing code from scratch.

Even if your team is unfamiliar with React Native framework, their prior knowledge of JavaScript or React is enough to get started. This platform is comparatively easier to learn and has several open-source libraries to import mobile components.

3. Hot and live reloading

React Native offers hot and live reloading features out of the box. In simple terms, these features allow app developers to work on core changes in real-time without restarting the application. You can make relevant fixes or add new features to the live application.

The live reloading feature of this framework reloads the entire application after any changes, while the hot reloading feature reloads the specific section to which the change occurred.

These React Native framework features significantly improve the testing and development process. When you don’t have to restart or reload the application every time a change is made, the app development process becomes much more efficient, faster, and intuitive.

4. High-performance applications

React Native employs a simplified binding strategy for its code. It implies that to change any particular object in the code base, the developer has to modify its state before applying updates. It helps ensure that the app is reliable and stable after updates. React Native produces the most durable and high-performing applications compared to any other cross-platform development framework.

This capability makes React Native suitable for small-scale and enterprise-level mobile applications.

Conclusion

React Native is one of the best frameworks for creating cross-platform apps due to its unique benefits for mobile application development. Its dependency on JavaScript allows developers to develop native app experience in their mobile applications without using platform-specific programming languages such as Java for Android or Objective C++ for iOS.

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Why is Flutter better than React Native for developing cross-platform applications?

Posted on September 19, 2022September 28, 2022 by vallish

Cross-platform development has too many advocates now. With so many technologies available, creating platform-independent software with a single code base is possible.

Think about how straightforward it is to deploy and manage a single code for Android and iOS versions of the same app.

The popularity of cross-platform applications is on the rise, contributed by the ease of working on a single codebase, easy availability of hybrid app development tools, and consistent behavior of such applications.

Another reason to choose the cross-platform approach is that it’s faster and more economical from a business standpoint.

Several frameworks are available for cross-platform development, such as Flutter, React Native, Ionic, Xamarin, and Cordova. However, Flutter and React Native are the market leaders capturing 42% and 38% of the cross-platform development market, respectively.

Both frameworks offer freedom to create the best cross-platform applications, but Flutter still enjoys an edge over React Native.

Why?

That’s what we are exploring in this article.

Flutter and React Native: A background check

Flutter and React Native was developed as a solution to deploy Android and iOS apps based on a single codebase. Google created Flutter in 2017, while Facebook open-sourced its internal React Native project in 2015.

Flutter is a complete UI framework that allows fast development of user interfaces based on the Material Design and Apple Human interface guidelines. Some popular apps built with Flutter include Google Ads, Alibaba, and Birch Finance.

React Native is Facebook’s cross-platform app development framework based on React (also developed by Facebook). Since 2015, many enterprise-level companies have adopted this framework, including Instagram, SoundCloud Pulse, and Skype.

Let’s find out why developers favor Flutter over React Native.

Performance

Flutter apps are much faster than applications developed with React Native. It has its engine and programming language. Flutter apps are written in Dart; a Java-like programming language optimized explicitly for developing client applications for mobile, web, and server-side platforms. Flutter also has integrated native compilers that convert Dart code to native instructions for ARM processors, resulting in an impressive performance boost.

React Native is entirely based on JavaScript; as a result, the code is more difficult to debug and maintain. Also, in the absence of no native compilers, it’s slower.

Architecture

Flutter is created as a framework for developing UI, which is why it has a low-level Skia engine used in Chrome browsers and Android OS. The engine empowers Flutter to render its component at a higher speed of 60FPS, which results in high performance. Also, it uses its widget library to display Flutter UI seamlessly during UI operation. These architectural features allow Flutter apps to look consistent on Android and iOS. It also results in the unification of the UI appearance regardless of the version of the operating system.

React Native uses a JavaScript engine that acts as a bridge between the native OS components and the JavaScript code of the app. While this approach makes the apps closely resemble native apps, it creates performance issues due to the time taken to interpret JavaScript code.

Smaller app size

Another benefit of using Flutter for cross-platform application development is the smaller app size. The framework uses fewer additional components to compile the code to simple ARM instructions. Flutter does not store anything more than the bare minimum to run apps. On the contrary, React Native needs more storage to store JavaScript code and interpret the statements. It leads to a bigger app size. For instance, the React Native binary takes up twice as much space on a device’s storage compared to Flutter. As mobile storage is expensive, developers prefer Flutter for cross-platform development.

Development tools and documentation

The convenience of a development tool dramatically depends on the ease of learning and setup. A good framework is easy to learn and operate.

Flutter SDK provides a complete set of tools to help developers quickly learn how to create and debug applications. It also integrates with popular code editors like Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDEA. It also offers tools for debugging, test automation, and monitoring app performance. Flutter has a “hot reload” feature that allows developers to run a new code without restarting the whole application. It saves significant time when debugging an application. The Flutter documentation is also top-notch, with some excellent starter toolkit guides to help developers learn fast.

React Native also has a robust documentation and tutorials library supported by its vast developer community. However, it is not beginner friendly, as it can be challenging to set up, and getting started is quite complex if you are new to cross-platform development.

Conclusion

Although Flutter is relatively new compared to React Native, it is fast becoming the preferred framework for cross-platform development. Development with Flutter is faster, cheaper, and results in high-performance apps – some of the reasons it is better than React Native for cross-platform development.

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What Is Flutter Framework?

When to Use Flutter?

Benefits of using Flutter framework for app development

What Is React Native?

When Should You Use React Native?

Benefits of React Native:

React Native Vs. Flutter

Which One Should You Choose?

Conclusion

In-depth knowledge of JavaScript

Familiarity with React assumptions

Familiarity with frequently used tools

Official resources

Online courses and tutorials for React Native developers

Books for React Native developers

Online communities for React Native developers

Podcasts for React Native developers

Conclusion

An overview of React Native

Reasons to use React Native for app development

1. Code reusability

2. Easy availability of JavaScript resources

3. Hot and live reloading

4. High-performance applications

Conclusion

Flutter and React Native: A background check

Performance

Architecture

Smaller app size

Development tools and documentation

Conclusion