This question arises when companies are trying to determine what technologies to use when creating mobile applications. Several businesses have asked me about the difference between building cross platforms apps and building Native apps.
Cross platform means you can use technologies such as react native or flutter to create an app that is compatible for both iOS and Android devices. The benefits of using React Native or Flutter is to lower the cost of building two separate Native apps.
Native apps means that you can build an iOS app or an Android app separately based on their own framework and programming languages. For example iOS apps, you will be using either Objective-C or Swift in XCode (only available on Macs). While building an Android app, you will use Java, Kotlin, C++, C#, or Python in Android Studio.
Native apps have the best performance and can be optimized easily. Processing and navigation on native apps run smoothly with no issues. Native apps are more secure, has reliable data protection, and encryption for all users. During the beginning and end of the development life cycle, a native app has significantly less bugs than react native or flutter.
The cost of Native apps are more expensive and usually involves two developers to maintain two separate mobile apps in iOS and Android. It also requires more development time and frequent upgrades.
React Native was created by Facebook on March 26, 2015. It is entirely written in JavaScript and if you are a web developer, you can now build mobile apps. It is easier to find JavaScript developers and support than Flutter developers. There's tons of meetup groups and events on building mobile apps using React Native. It has gained a lot of trust and popularity throughout the years.
The cons of using React Native is performance and speed of loading apps. It uses more memory and management.
Flutter was created by Google in May 2017, is relatively new, and is written in the language called Dart. Flutter provides a hot reload feature which allows changes to show very quickly and more performant. It is very dynamic and great for building quicks MVPs.
The cons of using Flutter is that there’s limited documentation and the Flutter community is much smaller than React Native. There's also a risk of using Flutter if Google ever pulled support from this project.
Our mobile development team is happy to provide you with the best service and architect your app solution based on your requirements and help you determine which technologies to use. Looking ahead, we are most likely moving away from native apps in the future and using newer technologies by building cross platform mobile apps. If you have any questions about this article or want more information, contact us through this form.