Why I like Flutter more than React Native

If you are going to build a cross-platform mobile app in 2023, then there are 2 big competitors in this space. We have React Native and Flutter. Both are great frameworks, made by 2 large tech companies and used by many developers around the world. Here is why I like Flutter more.

Developer Experience(DX)

The tooling for Flutter, especially in vscode is one of the best tooling for a framework I have ever seen. Want to make a widget a child of another widget? CTRL + ., select what you want to wrap it with and there you have it. It is wrapped with another widget. There is also a community extension called Awesome Flutter(available both in the vscode marketplace and openvsix).

Premade Stuff

When you make a flutter app, you don’t just have to build things from scratch. There are premade widgets(that you will actually use) made by Google allowing you to quickly build stuff. These widgets are highly customizable and are made to look either like the Apple design system(cupertino) or the Google design system(material). Typically, a cross-platform app will use material design as it is made to look great on all platforms. In comparison, in react native, just like the react library itself, only core things are officially made while the rest is made by the open source community.

Dart

Dart is the language you work with the Flutter framework in. Dart is a curly braced language making it so typescript and javascript developers will feel right at home. Dart in my opinion is really nice to code in. It comes with some features that other languages should have. For example, you can use if statements within arrays, a handy feature allowing you to conditionally have an element in an array.

Conclusion

From this, you can see why I like flutter. I like it’s developer experience, the premade widgets, and Dart as a programming language. However, you should try them both to see what you like. This is just my opinion.

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