Flutter Introduction
There are many frameworks available to develop mobile applications for Android and iOS and both.
To develop android applications, one can use java / kotlin language and for iOS Objective-C / Swift language can be used.
There are also hybrid frameworks available like React Native, Ionic, Xamarin, PhoneGap etc which support both Android and iOS OS.
Flutter is a cross-platform UI toolkit to build applications for Android, iOS and Web with one programming language and single codebase. During development, Flutter apps run in a VM that offers stateful hot reload of changes without needing a full recompile. For release, Flutter apps are compiled directly to machine code, whether Intel x64 or ARM instructions, or to JavaScript if targeting the web. It is free and open-source. It uses Dart programming language to develop applications.
| Flutter | React Native | |
|---|---|---|
| Programming language | Dart | JavaScript |
| Created by | ||
| First release | 2018 | 2015 |
| Free and open source | Yes | Yes |
| Top apps build on | Google Ads, Groupon, Square, Ebay, Dream 11 | Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Ads, Skype |
| Community | Rapidly growing community and popularity | Mature, vast community |
| UI | UI will be displayed identical across platform | Platform specific UI will be displayed. |
| Performance | Better than React Native | - |
Features of Flutter
- Open source
- Cross platform
- Accessible Native Features and SDKs
- Hot Reload
- Minimal code
- Widgets