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Due to the sturdy development of mobile devices (8.98 billion) and its continuously growing users’ number, building mobile apps (4 million) has become more popular than ever. In fact, it might be surprising to know that most people spend a quarter of their day staring at their mobiles; in which, 2 hours are allocated on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Youtube. 

Having said that, adopting mobile app is a way for businesses to stay on top of the game. More and more SME have started to adopt this on-going trend in order to interact at a greater distance with their customers/ clients and of course, gaining their competitive advantage over their rivals on the market. 

While some native tools and technologies such as Xcode, Swift, Android Studio and Kotlin/Java provided by Apple and Google require knowledge of a different set of technologies, cross-platform solutions such as Flutter and React Native can get developers to build apps using one single language on both iOS and Android systems. 

In this post, Trinh Dang, our technical lead, is very eager to share his insights on these two development approaches. 

So, what are Flutter and React Native?

Flutter is a portable UI toolkit by Google to support building mobile, web and desktop app from a single codebase. It is fast, expressive/flexible UI and provides native performance. 

React Native, on the other hand, is a framework that helps build mobile applications that look and feel native for both iOS and Android using only JavaScript, targeted at mobile platforms. 

Why shall we use them?

Both Flutter and React Native are main development frameworks for cross-platform mobile app development, backed by the two tech giants Google and Facebook respectively. There is, of course, no silver bullet when considering between technologies; however, I can give my 2 cents of opinion for both frameworks:

DataHouse has been developing mobile apps for many years using React Native to build our competency (previously, we started it native development with Java for Android and Objective-C for iOS; then switched to Xamarin for cross-platform development) together with ReactJS. It is also easier to source for resources for the company using this framework due to its popularity. 

How capable of DataHouse to develop mobile apps using Flutter?

Although we are talking about cross-platform development for mobile apps, it still requires deep knowledge of mobile development (Android & iOS). We came to this conclusion from various types of development we have done before using native (Java/Objective-C), Xamarin (C#), React Native (JavaScript). If you already have good knowledge of mobile development, it costs little time to adopt the new framework such as Flutter.