Flutter vs Native Development
Flutter Use Cases:
- MVP mobile applications
- Apps with material design
- Apps that function with OS-level features
- Advanced OS plugins with simple logic
- High-performance apps with Skia rendering engine
- Flexible UI with high-level widgets
- Reactivate apps with vast data integration
Native Use Cases:
- AR/VR applications
- Apps with rich-animations
- Gaming apps
- Standalone native applications
- Apps with complex/advanced UI
- GPS-centric apps
- Travel based applications
- On-demand apps with heavy computation
- AI-triggered apps with large data volumes
- IoT apps that connect with TV, Watch and Wallets
Speed and Cost of Development
Native Technologies:
Time taken to build mobile applications with native technologies differs based on your budget, timeline, and scaling ability. The creation of small-scale and enterprise-level apps is possible with native technologies to satisfy the expectations of iOS and Android users. So either the development team will be large or there will be a requirement for two special teams for iOS and Android.
This would add to your project’s investment budget as two codes have to be written for two different platforms with separate functionalities. In other words, native technologies abide by the “write twice, run twice” approach.
Flutter:
Flutter follows the “write once, run anywhere” approach, providing developers with the ability to write one code for two different platforms. This indicates that the time taken for development would be significantly shortened with reduced development cost. It’s taken no more than five developers for big players like Alibaba, BMW, Watermaniac, PostMuse among others to build their applications on Flutter.
Not only does it allow developers to write codes effortlessly but it’s also easier for new developers to understand those codes. Since the training cost is economical, even a novice developer can be trained easily, eliminating the need to hire multiple experienced developers.
Code Maintenance
Native Technologies:
Maintaining a native application is time-consuming and an expensive option as you will be programming your app for respective platforms. The reason is simple- maintaining two codebases requires serious efforts, plus, developers have to identify bugs and problems for each platform to create different updates on a regular basis. Also, the maintenance costs grow proportionally with the line of the supported OS devices.
Flutter:
Maintaining a Flutter application is easy as you’re only maintaining a single codebase for two applications. The simplicity of code helps developers spot issues, source external tools, and easily support third-party libraries. Furthermore, the stateful Hot Reloading feature of Flutter immediately resolves issues at hand.
Application Performance
Native Technologies:
Due to the native performance functionalities, iOS and Android apps perform all-to-well even without external library kits. Without a doubt, native apps built with native technologies perform well at 60 FPS and 120 FPS even when “Core Animations” are created for your application. The maximum GPU usage native technologies load over the RAM ranges between 30% to 45% of the overall GPU performance.
Flutter:
With its default availability of native components, Flutter does not require a bridge to communicate between the native modules. The performance test on a standard device indicated that the “hello world” app always performed at 60 FPS, and the time taken to render each frame does not take longer than 16 milliseconds.