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How does react native compare to flutter nowadays? Is this still the framework for simple apps that need to be cross platform?

RayVR 4y ago
React native now has enough useful but abandoned projects to make it a minefield. Reading through the list of changes, I know of several projects which are unmaintained that I would have to scrap in order to upgrade. I don’t know much about flutter.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  That was my experience with RN. The React ecosystem is nice but the RN specific libraries that come with native components have been nightmares. This includes libraries from major companies that were incomplete (as in didn't implement functionality that they claimed to have in the repository readme file), badly broken, and nearly no documentation. Once I realized how common this was, I just implemented my own native components when required. React Native itself was and is very good, good enough to make it worth using despite the minefield ecosystem.
mhoad 4y ago
I just saw a bunch of numbers last night that suggested Flutter had taken the title as more popular and had it beat fairly comprehensively in terms of developer experience and performance. I’m trying to find it now but not having a lot of luck as it was a random Twitter thread that was pulling in a bunch of things from various sources, so take it for what you will in the meantime. For what it’s worth as someone who has spent a bunch of time with Flutter at this point, none of that surprised me to hear, it’s actually a really pleasant experience, the tooling is amazing and unlike anything I had seen before as all of my experience was with web before. It’s underlying architecture feels really solid, also despite people talking a lot of trash about it, it turns out Dart is actually a really great language as a mix between C#, Java, Kotlin and JavaScript of sorts. I think every serious criticism I have seen levelled at both Dart and Flutter is also actively addressed on their roadmap so I also feel extremely good about the future direction of both projects. Like in short, probably the best thing I’ve discovered in a few years code wise, would recommend checking it out.
EnKopVand 4y ago
I’m not sure what to tell you from a technical perspective, in my part of the world nobody uses flutter so there is that as a disclaimer. From a developer resource perspective, however, you use react native because it lets you share developers across platforms. Similar to how you might use nodejs on the backend for the exact same reason. If you’re splitting your developer resources anyway, I would frankly just go native mobile department.
jamil7 4y ago
They both have their issues, to be honest. I'd probably still pick RN though if I was going for cross-platform, despite its warts. Not convinced by Flutter at all yet. We're using Kotlin Multiplatform and Swift/Kotlin UI on a project I'm on now, but that might not be ideal for very small teams or a solo developer.
moomoo11 4y ago
I switched to flutter a couple years ago after a RN upgrade caused me days of pain. Took a couple weeks to port the app over to flutter, and I've never looked back. I only use flutter for mobile apps, and I have no experience using flutter web because I have never had the use case IRL where the web apps map 1:1 with the mobile app. They almost always have different implementations and functionalities, and its better to just use react or svelte. Seriously having a hard time coming up with cons, so here are my reasons why I like it: - dart is super easy to use - pub dev is nice, and using forked packages is easy - great community support - works for every use case I've encountered so far (push notifications, social logins, maps, video calls, background stuff, chat, etc.)
chronofar 4y ago
Personally I’d much rather work with Flutter than RN. The tooling and general developer experience I find to be far superior. But of course the primary advantage of RN is the ecosystem of developers and libraries it comes with, so if those are important to you I don’t believe Flutter will catch up any time soon. Personally I think those are a bit overrated. Any competent JS developer could pick up Dart very quickly, and all the various bits of browser knowledge a front end developer would have that are more valuable wouldn’t be applicable here, so to me “used before” only offers rather modest gains, and over the long run isn’t much to base a decision on.
- sgt 4y ago
  Flutter/Dart is amazing and it's OK to have fewer libraries. The JS ecosystem is varying in quality (much more so than the Dart ecosystem, in my experience). What I would not use Flutter for yet is Flutter Web. I've made that mistake, and although it was a big success in the end, we had many many hurdles, some of which are serious bugs that remain to this day (like you can't autofocus a field, flickering, extremely slow scrolling, etc).
  - mhoad 4y ago
    I’m really waiting for WebGPU and WASM with garbage collection to land in the browser across the board. I think both of those technologies are going to be key to unlocking a the power of Flutter web.
    - sgt 4y ago
      Yes, I agree. Interesting times ahead, but it will likely take 2-3 years.
      - mhoad 4y ago
        Agreed, this is also my timeline for Flutter web becoming a more serious contender. There are one or two other technologies/ standards that are an important piece of the puzzle like the accessibility object model to start to decouple accessibility from the rendered DOM interface for example and allow canvas based interfaces to become better supported. But I follow a lot of that stuff pretty closely and 2-3 years seems like more than enough time, a bunch of it is probably slated to happen as early as this year (WebGPU behind a flag already on all browsers I believe, WasmGC under active development in all browsers, dart already has a functional WASM compiler and a new graphics engine ready to go and take advantage of it etc..) Some basic details here for anyone interested in this topic https://youtu.be/kCnYRhkfWHY https://youtu.be/kCnYRhkfWHY
zigzag312 4y ago
React native is a wrapper around OS's native controls and Flutter is a framework with it's own implementation of UI controls. Each approach has it's pros and cons.
livinglist 4y ago
For those of who want to try out a Flutter app, here’s a HN client I wrote recently: https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki
akmarinov 4y ago
The whole idea of “learn once, write everywhere”, React being the #1 used web framework and the sheer amount of React developers out there is something that Flutter will likely never overcome. If you’re starting a project tomorrow, you can easily find 100 developers with years of React experience, where there are barely any experienced Flutter devs. At that point, might as well go completely native.
- mhoad 4y ago
  For maybe a single weeks worth of investment you could pick up Dart (the learning curve is tiny) and have that exact same value proposition of write once and run anywhere but with many other substantial advantages on top of it. Here’s a completely arbitrary one from just yesterday that focuses on supply chain security (https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/06/Dart-and-Flutter-enable-Allstar-and-Security-Scorecards.html https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/06/Dart-and-Flutter-e...) but this kind of thing is happening on an almost weekly basis in the background around Dart and Flutter. I don’t think people understand what’s happening behind the scenes on these projects but they are developing some very solid fundamentals to build on top of into the future. Seriously take a look at this basic language tour, it’s incredibly familiar for anyone with an OO background out of the box https://dart.dev/guides/language/language-tour https://dart.dev/guides/language/language-tour
- krzat 4y ago
  What RN will never overcome is being an unstable wrapper around unstable native UI toolkits. Pretty much everyone who used RN complains about bugs, and this is the reason.
- googleide 4y ago
  >you can easily find 100 developers with years of React experience And nearly all of them completely useless. Most react devs don't even understand Fibers or have any empathy with DOM, javascript, and other parts of the common web stack, most can barely explain when something will render, what memoization is, what reference equality is and so on. It's easy to breach the 10x factor as React dev and 100x is achievable.

RayVR 4y ago

React native now has enough useful but abandoned projects to make it a minefield. Reading through the list of changes, I know of several projects which are unmaintained that I would have to scrap in order to upgrade. I don’t know much about flutter.

jrumbut 4y ago
That was my experience with RN. The React ecosystem is nice but the RN specific libraries that come with native components have been nightmares. This includes libraries from major companies that were incomplete (as in didn't implement functionality that they claimed to have in the repository readme file), badly broken, and nearly no documentation. Once I realized how common this was, I just implemented my own native components when required. React Native itself was and is very good, good enough to make it worth using despite the minefield ecosystem.

mhoad 4y ago

I just saw a bunch of numbers last night that suggested Flutter had taken the title as more popular and had it beat fairly comprehensively in terms of developer experience and performance. I’m trying to find it now but not having a lot of luck as it was a random Twitter thread that was pulling in a bunch of things from various sources, so take it for what you will in the meantime. For what it’s worth as someone who has spent a bunch of time with Flutter at this point, none of that surprised me to hear, it’s actually a really pleasant experience, the tooling is amazing and unlike anything I had seen before as all of my experience was with web before. It’s underlying architecture feels really solid, also despite people talking a lot of trash about it, it turns out Dart is actually a really great language as a mix between C#, Java, Kotlin and JavaScript of sorts. I think every serious criticism I have seen levelled at both Dart and Flutter is also actively addressed on their roadmap so I also feel extremely good about the future direction of both projects. Like in short, probably the best thing I’ve discovered in a few years code wise, would recommend checking it out.

EnKopVand 4y ago

I’m not sure what to tell you from a technical perspective, in my part of the world nobody uses flutter so there is that as a disclaimer. From a developer resource perspective, however, you use react native because it lets you share developers across platforms. Similar to how you might use nodejs on the backend for the exact same reason. If you’re splitting your developer resources anyway, I would frankly just go native mobile department.

jamil7 4y ago

They both have their issues, to be honest. I'd probably still pick RN though if I was going for cross-platform, despite its warts. Not convinced by Flutter at all yet. We're using Kotlin Multiplatform and Swift/Kotlin UI on a project I'm on now, but that might not be ideal for very small teams or a solo developer.

moomoo11 4y ago

I switched to flutter a couple years ago after a RN upgrade caused me days of pain. Took a couple weeks to port the app over to flutter, and I've never looked back. I only use flutter for mobile apps, and I have no experience using flutter web because I have never had the use case IRL where the web apps map 1:1 with the mobile app. They almost always have different implementations and functionalities, and its better to just use react or svelte. Seriously having a hard time coming up with cons, so here are my reasons why I like it: - dart is super easy to use - pub dev is nice, and using forked packages is easy - great community support - works for every use case I've encountered so far (push notifications, social logins, maps, video calls, background stuff, chat, etc.)

chronofar 4y ago

Personally I’d much rather work with Flutter than RN. The tooling and general developer experience I find to be far superior. But of course the primary advantage of RN is the ecosystem of developers and libraries it comes with, so if those are important to you I don’t believe Flutter will catch up any time soon. Personally I think those are a bit overrated. Any competent JS developer could pick up Dart very quickly, and all the various bits of browser knowledge a front end developer would have that are more valuable wouldn’t be applicable here, so to me “used before” only offers rather modest gains, and over the long run isn’t much to base a decision on.

sgt 4y ago
Flutter/Dart is amazing and it's OK to have fewer libraries. The JS ecosystem is varying in quality (much more so than the Dart ecosystem, in my experience). What I would not use Flutter for yet is Flutter Web. I've made that mistake, and although it was a big success in the end, we had many many hurdles, some of which are serious bugs that remain to this day (like you can't autofocus a field, flickering, extremely slow scrolling, etc).
- mhoad 4y ago
  I’m really waiting for WebGPU and WASM with garbage collection to land in the browser across the board. I think both of those technologies are going to be key to unlocking a the power of Flutter web.
  - sgt 4y ago
    Yes, I agree. Interesting times ahead, but it will likely take 2-3 years.
    - mhoad 4y ago
      Agreed, this is also my timeline for Flutter web becoming a more serious contender. There are one or two other technologies/ standards that are an important piece of the puzzle like the accessibility object model to start to decouple accessibility from the rendered DOM interface for example and allow canvas based interfaces to become better supported. But I follow a lot of that stuff pretty closely and 2-3 years seems like more than enough time, a bunch of it is probably slated to happen as early as this year (WebGPU behind a flag already on all browsers I believe, WasmGC under active development in all browsers, dart already has a functional WASM compiler and a new graphics engine ready to go and take advantage of it etc..) Some basic details here for anyone interested in this topic https://youtu.be/kCnYRhkfWHY https://youtu.be/kCnYRhkfWHY

zigzag312 4y ago

React native is a wrapper around OS's native controls and Flutter is a framework with it's own implementation of UI controls. Each approach has it's pros and cons.

livinglist 4y ago

For those of who want to try out a Flutter app, here’s a HN client I wrote recently: https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki

akmarinov 4y ago

The whole idea of “learn once, write everywhere”, React being the #1 used web framework and the sheer amount of React developers out there is something that Flutter will likely never overcome. If you’re starting a project tomorrow, you can easily find 100 developers with years of React experience, where there are barely any experienced Flutter devs. At that point, might as well go completely native.

mhoad 4y ago
For maybe a single weeks worth of investment you could pick up Dart (the learning curve is tiny) and have that exact same value proposition of write once and run anywhere but with many other substantial advantages on top of it. Here’s a completely arbitrary one from just yesterday that focuses on supply chain security (https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/06/Dart-and-Flutter-enable-Allstar-and-Security-Scorecards.html https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/06/Dart-and-Flutter-e...) but this kind of thing is happening on an almost weekly basis in the background around Dart and Flutter. I don’t think people understand what’s happening behind the scenes on these projects but they are developing some very solid fundamentals to build on top of into the future. Seriously take a look at this basic language tour, it’s incredibly familiar for anyone with an OO background out of the box https://dart.dev/guides/language/language-tour https://dart.dev/guides/language/language-tour
krzat 4y ago
What RN will never overcome is being an unstable wrapper around unstable native UI toolkits. Pretty much everyone who used RN complains about bugs, and this is the reason.
googleide 4y ago
>you can easily find 100 developers with years of React experience And nearly all of them completely useless. Most react devs don't even understand Fibers or have any empathy with DOM, javascript, and other parts of the common web stack, most can barely explain when something will render, what memoization is, what reference equality is and so on. It's easy to breach the 10x factor as React dev and 100x is achievable.