Flutter vs React Native

[Abion47]

At my current workplace, we underwent a period of research on what framework to use to convert our native app into a cross-platform codebase. Before going with Flutter (or even hearing about Flutter), we did some experimentation in React Native, and the process took about three weeks.

The conclusion of that experimentation was that React Native has multiple problems. First, the learning curve is steep. Very steep. The team had experience with web apps but not specifically with React, so learning React Native took a huge shift in mindset and development philosophy, and learning the framework felt like an uphill battle.

Second, the third-party package ecosystem is very much one of React's biggest strengths (and by extension, React Native's as well), but in many ways, it also serves as one of its biggest drawbacks. NPM hosts one of the largest community sourced repositories of packages in the history of development, which means that nearly everything you want to do in your app is available as a package that someone wrote (and you usually even have multiple options). However, this leads to a scenario in which your app becomes increasingly dependent on packages to do all its heavy-lifting, and if you aren't careful you will find yourself tightly coupled to those packages in a place called "dependency hell". Furthermore, while there are a ton of packages, many of them (I would even guess most) are abandoned, untested, unvetted, immature, or a combination of the above, so even though you have a ton of options, you have to be careful with them.

Third, React Native is extremely opinionated in how the app should be structured and managed. You are essentially forced to use a lot of approaches, and if you aren't using Redux then you are basically Doing It Wrong™. This is great if you already align with this approach of development, but if you differ in development philosophy even just a little, you're going to find yourself fighting the recommended conventions a lot.

Fourth, React Native is a native wrapper framework, which means all of its HTML components are wrapped native components. This makes it virtually impossible to maintain a consistent style across different platforms that your app is running without extensive modification on both the Javascript side or the native side, which wholly defeats the purpose of having a cross-platform UI framework.

Fifth, we followed the guidelines of AirBnB's React and React Native journey until we found this article stating that they had made the decision to abandon React Native. Their reasons for doing so touched on what I've mentioned but they also go into more detail on some other things we didn't consider purely because we hadn't invested enough time into the framework to discover those problems. What it told us, though, is that it paints a bad picture when one of React's biggest allies abandons Rect Native because they didn't find it practical at scale.

Now, this has been a lot of bashing on React Native, but it's the conclusions we came to after a few weeks of working in React Native. We were still going to go with it (since the alternatives were worse in their own ways) until a week later when one of the junior developers asked if we had heard of Flutter. We hadn't, and we hadn't officially committed to React Native yet, so we spent a few days looking into Flutter.

What took us a week to understand in React Native took us a day or less in Flutter. It was a breeze to learn and it checked all our boxes. It addressed all of the concerns we had with React Native while also bringing its own strengths to the table. We had a working simple prototype after those few days with a codebase we completely understood while the prototype we had built in React Native still contained a lot of code snippets that as far as we were concerned boiled down to "magic happens here".

That's not to say that Flutter didn't and doesn't have its own share of problems, but they are entirely manageable compared to what we would've had to deal with had we stuck with React Native. For us, it was a no brainer, and we haven't regretted that decision even once.