Cross Platform Development: Should You Pick Flutter, React Native, or Xamarin?

Mobile apps have firmly established themselves as a crucial part of our lives. They use mobile devices for everything, one can imagine with their significant number of consumers comprising of millennials. While multiple technologies and solutions enable companies to develop high-quality mobile apps for their business, there's no solution as versatile and dynamic as cross-platform app development frameworks.

Cross-Platform App Development is the approach that offers the best platforms, resources, and tools for development teams. As per estimates, the cross-platform app development will surpass $7.5 billion by 2018. It supports seamless coding for iOS, Android, Windows and more all at the same time. A well-made cross-platform mobile app enables users to develop applications on more than one platform with access to your product or service. 

Read on to learn the differentiators between the three leading cross-platform app development frameworks, namely, Flutter, React Native, and Xamarin.

1. Architecture: Created by Google, Flutter makes use of Dart along with a stockpile of native widgets to deliver high-quality cross-platform apps. The architecture is the basis of reactive programming, which is currently quite in demand.

React Native offers support for architecture modularity, which enables organizing application code into different, individual blocks. It consequently allows agile development and ease of updating the final product.

Finally, Xamarin supports both the Model–View–View-Model (MVVM) as well as Model–View–Controller (MVC) architectures. While MVVM allows developers to build different processes with the same codebase, MVC facilitates separate application logic as well as presentation, thus speeding up development.

2. Support: While Flutter certainly gets an accomplished set of framework-based tools and libraries, there are a large number of third-party services, such as payment systems, Android TV, and Apple TV, that still don't support this framework.

In this regard, React Native fares better than Flutter; since developers across the globe approve its benefits, a variety of third-party services offer APIs as well as plug-ins for React Native apps. Furthermore, there’s also third-party support for payment systems, graphics, maps, and more.

Xamarin, on the other hand, comes loaded with a full set of tools for development. It includes its IDE, Xamarin SDKs, Xamarin Test Cloud for testing, and Xamarin.Insights and Hockeyapp platforms for distribution and analytics. It means there is no need for either additional tools or integration of third-party apps to develop, test, and deploy apps build on the Xamarin framework.

3. UI/UX: Flutter’s layout is comparatively small, which means it is simpler to streamline. Additionally, since every UI element is a widget, it means the entire application's layout gets rendered merely and conveniently.

React Native makes use of a variety of native UI components, which means that apps built using React Native look just like native apps.

UI development with Xamarin takes much time since the central UI creation is not mobile. While Xamarin.Forms enable sharing of specific UI components; some components still need to be developed individually for each platform.

As you can see, each of these three popular frameworks is terrific for cross-platform app development. However, it can be challenging to pick which one among them is the best decisively. It is because the final decision for the choice of framework is subjective and dependent on the business' requirements. However, remember, if you are thinking of creating a mobile application using Xamarin, React Native or Flutter, it is always a good idea to get some expert help from a trusted service provider, such as Rishabh Software. This way you can ensure the quality as well as the success of your app.

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