React Native and Flutter are the top mobile frameworks for building iOS and Android mobile applications. These frameworks have been the gossip amongst the developer community, with a lot of competition and comparison between the two in recent years.

Flutter.

 

What is it?

 

A portable UI toolkit for building natively-compiled apps across mobile, web, and desktop* from a single codebase.

 

Official release - December 2018, Google I/O

 

Created by -Google

 

Programming language - Dart

 

Popularity - 81,200 Stars on Github (December 2019)

 

UI - Flutter apps look as good on the up-to-date operating systems as they do on older versions.

Since they only have one codebase, the apps look and behave similarly across iOS and Android – but thanks to Material Design and Cupertino widgets, they can also imitate the platform design itself. How’s that possible?

Flutter contains two sets of widgets which conform to specific design languages: Material Design widgets implement Google’s design language of the same name; Cupertino widgets imitate Apple’s iOS design.

This means that your Flutter app will look and behave naturally on each platform, imitating their native components. 

React native

 

What is it?

 

A framework for building native applications using React.

 

Official release - March 2015, F8 Conference

 

Created by - Facebook

 

Programming language - JavaScript

 

Popularity - 83,200 stars on Github (December 2019)

 

UI - Application components look just like native ones (e.g. a button on an iOS device looks just like a native iOS button, and the same on Android).

The fact React Native uses native components under the hood should give you confidence that, after any OS UI update, your app’s components will be instantly upgraded as well.

That said, this can break the app’s UI but it happens very rarely.

If you want your app to look near-identical across platforms – as well as on older versions of an operating system (as Flutter achieves) – then consider using third-party libraries (like this one). They will enable you to use Material Design components, in place of native ones.