What is the Best Technology for Mobile App Development?

The number of Mobile App Development is constantly increasing and development methods continue to evolve in order to best satisfy the thousands of users.

There are different kinds of applications: the native applications, the web application and in the middle there are the hybrid applications.

Native applications

Let’s start with the native applications. These are applications developed for a specific operating system (iOS or Android). Which are downloaded and installed on your smartphone.

These are high-performance and robust applications due to their construction. Indeed, native applications are written with languages ​​specific to operating systems (Objective-C and Swift for IOS and Java and Kotlin for Android).

It is therefore more difficult to compete by developing an Android and IOS application with a single language. More difficult, of course, but possible as you will discover in this article. You can hire full-stack developers who can develop for both operating systems.

Web applications

Then there are web applications, which are the opposite of native applications. Web applications are, in a way, the mobile version of a website. The goal of these applications is to make content accessible on mobile.

You don’t have to download them to your smartphone, you access them through a browser. Therefore, one of the weak points of these applications is that they need the internet to function. Conversely, this access via a browser allows these applications to work on IOS and Android with a single mobile app development.

Hybrid applications

Finally, there are hybrid apps which are a mix between native apps and web apps.

You should know that the main difficulty in the development of a mobile application is to make it compatible with both Android and IOS. However, these are different operating systems and development environments that require two ways of developing.

It is from this problem that the idea of ​​creating multi-platform applications using a single code was born, which saves significant time and really facilitates the developer’s work. There are several approaches, including hybrid applications.

Hybrid applications are installed on your smartphone like native applications. The main advantage is their speed of development because their construction is less complex than a native application. And since they only require one code, they are less expensive.

The quality of an application is mainly based on its speed of execution and user experience. The hybrid solution was for a long time inferior to the native on these two criteria. But, today, there are technologies that can compete with native applications. We will show you two, compare them and explain which one we recommend for your application.

React Native and Flutter: Top mobile app development trends

React Native and Flutter, two frameworks (a set of tools that create the foundations of a software or an application, an architecture that simplifies the work of developers), allow the development of cross-platform applications that do not require use only a single code and whose performance closely resembles that of a native application.

These are the most popular solutions to solve the problem of dual IOS and Android development. Both developed by web giants, Facebook for React Native and Google for Flutter, they each have advantages and disadvantages that we will compare to choose the best approach.

Community

React Native:
React Native entered the market in 2015. Since then, its popularity has grown steadily and is used for applications such as Facebook, Instagram, Airbn’b, etc. There is a large community to hire React Native developers.

Flutter:
Google launched Flutter in 2017. Even if it is a fairly recent framework, we can see that it is already well installed and that its community is growing very quickly. It will most certainly catch up with React Native.

Programming language and development

React Native
React Native is written in Javascript, a language well known and used by many developers, so it is easy to use but it is not the most robust language, there are risks of bugs. Its development is faster than that of Flutter but the quality is lower.

Flutter
Flutter is written in Dart (also developed by Google in 2011), a language somewhere between Java and JavaScript but more robust than the latter. Development takes more time, but it performs better than React Native. Although there are not many Dart developers yet, this language is easy to understand for many Java and JavaScript developers.

Programming language and development

React Native:
React Native is written in Javascript, a language well known and used by many developers, so it is easy to use but it is not the most robust language, there are risks of bugs. Its development is faster than that of Flutter but the quality is lower.

Flutter:
Flutter is written in Dart (also developed by Google in 2011), a language somewhere between Java and JavaScript but more robust than the latter. Development takes more time, but it performs better than React Native. Although there are not many Dart developers yet, this language is easy to understand for many Java and JavaScript developers.

User experience – UX

For a cross-platform mobile application, native component support is essential because without native component support, your application will not “feel” like a native application.

React Native:
React Native uses “bridges” to access native components and relies on various libraries, it is too dependent on them. Even if the feeling of a React Native application is close to a native application, this dependence induces a feeling a little less pleasant than Flutter.

Flutter:
Flutter has all native components, it doesn’t need to communicate with external libraries. As Flutter contains all the technologies to develop an application, it feels extremely similar to a native application.

Our advice

According to experts, Flutter is the future of mobile app development, it’s sort of the offspring of React Native. We also share this view.

Although this is a fairly recent solution, it has already proven that it can compete with and even surpass React Native. If we look at the various points analyzed previously, Flutter wins over the native React. It certainly takes more time to develop an application with Flutter, but it will be more robust and efficient. It is for all these reasons that we recommend Flutter to you.

In this article, we do not present you in detail the native applications (which we also develop) which require a longer development time and therefore higher costs, but we offer you alternatives which offer similar results at a lower cost.