Evaluation of React Native and Flutter for cross-platform mobile application development
Elin Hjort · Doria (University of Helsinki) · 2020
There is an increasing demand for mobile applications requiring software companies to deliver high-quality products at a fast pace while maintaining reasonable costs. Moreover, an application is often created for multiple platforms to reach as many users as possible. Development of native mobile applications is considered to be challenging due to the use of specific development environments and technologies for each platform. Cross-platform development can be a solution to this problem. This thesis evaluates React Native and Flutter, two of the most modern cross-platform frameworks, to determine which of them is best suited for mobile application development at the Finnish software company Gambit. The evaluation is done with regard to development for Android and iOS, since they are the most commonly used mobile platforms. In order to compare the frameworks a set of criteria has been constructed, where each criterion has a weight to define its significance for the evaluation. The criteria and their weights have been tailored to the needs at Gambit. The evaluation shows that mobile application development with React Native produced the best results, however, both cross-platform frameworks proved to be viable options to native development.