Last Updated on February 26, 2021
Smartphones and their equipped applications a significant part of our routine life. We are surrounded by applications capable of helping us with everything and anything. Hence, we can say that such importance of mobile applications in our day to day life makes it very necessary for developers to build promising applications. Mobile application development has grown significantly and rapidly over the last few years. So I am writing this blog post to help you understand which one is an ideal cross-platform app framework in 2021 amongst Felgo vs Flutter vs React Native.
Introduction-
There are so many technologies available for building mobile applications that sometimes it becomes quite challenging to choose one. And at that time, we look for information that bifurcates technologies and focuses on their advantages and disadvantages. I have been through this confusion. After reading and comparing Felgo vs Flutter vs React Native, I thought of sharing my knowledge with you. So, you can understand better about your choice. Let’s begin our journey and explore Felgo vs Flutter vs React Native.
Table of Index
1. A brief history of Mobile application development
2. Why should you choose Cross-Platform Development over Native Development?
3. An overview of Felgo, Flutter and React Native.
4. Felgo vs Flutter vs React Native: What’s the difference?
5. Felgo vs Flutter vs React Native: What are its key considerations?
A Brief History of Mobile Application Development
Mobile application development is still relatively evolving day by day. It’s a new area of endeavor. Thus, there’s no surprise to witness new tools being evolving now and then.
The Platform Software Development Kits (SDKs)
SDK is a set of tools that helps the developer to build custom mobile applications for specific platforms. The Apple iOS SDK was based on Objective-C and was released in 2008. On the other hand, Google Android SDK, based on Java, was released in 2009.
Your application communicates with the platform to create widgets or access services. The screen canvas later renders the widgets, and then the events are passed back to the widgets. Because of the different widgets, you need to create separate applications for the platforms.
WebViews
A Webview can be defined as a browser that is embedded in the native application. The first cross-platform framework was based on WebViews and Javascript. It seems obvious to develop a cross-platform application after Apple encouraged the third-party developer to build web applications for the iPhone.
Your application will build HTML and will show it in the WebView. It is challenging for the languages like Javascript to communicate with the native code directly, so they use ‘bridge,’ which contains context switches between Javascript and native code.
Reactive Views
ReactJs is one of the examples of Reactive Views. Using various programming pattern, it simplifies the formation of WebViews. The creation of React Native, in 2015, was considered revolutionary for mobile applications because of its reactive-style views. React Native app development is a widely used cross-platform app development framework. As it is a JavaScript-based platform, it works as a ‘bridge’ for accessing the native realm’s widgets.
So this was all about the evolution of the programming for applications. Let’s read more about Cross-Platform and Native Development.
Why Should You Choose Cross-Platform App Framework Over Native Development?
There are many technologies available to choose from when you start to create an application. Before choosing, we should know how helpful is the technology in building the application. So, take a deep breath and move forward with me to learn the fundamentals. We first need to understand why cross-platforms are more popular than native ones. And for that, we will look into the advantages and disadvantages of cross-platform and native platforms.
Cross-Platform Application Development
Advantages:
- Write code once for all the platforms.
- Maintaining a single codebase for different platforms.
- Fully customized UI.
- With the right framework, native development can be done.
Disadvantages:
- Different ways of using cross-platforms increases the size of applications.
- It slows down while accessing native features,
Native Application Development
Advantages:
- The minimum size of the application is 10MB.
- After optimizing, it provides the best performance.
- Access the feature sets directly from the platform.
Disadvantages:
- The requirement of separate code for various platforms
- High maintenance cost
- Challenging to create a custom UI for the application that doesn’t follow the platform’s style
Many cross-platform are introduced over time. Today we will add Felgo along with Flutter and React Native. Let’s dig into details about the comparison of Felgo Vs Flutter Vs React Native, and learn more about each of them.
An overview of Felgo, Flutter and React Native.
What is Felgo?
Felgo is a cross-platform application development SDK, based on the Qt framework and greatly extending it.
Felgo offers the development tool kit, components, and services for developing a cross-platform application. Felgo extends the Qt framework and uses the APIs provided by the framework. Felgo is using the Custom Rendering approach for developing applications. Initially, Felgo was designed for games only. But as time passed, the horizon of application development widened, and the framework evolved with new features. And now, it can provide a joint base for both application development and games.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is introduced by Google, provides reactive-style views, just as React Native. The only difference is its approach. Rather than using Javascript bridge, it uses the compiled programming language, called Dart, to avoid performance issues. The usage of Dart omits the context switch and allows direct communication with the platform.
Flutter uses its own customizable and extensible widgets for fast performance. That’s right; it doesn’t use platform widgets.
What is React Native?
React Native is one of the most preferred JavaScript frameworks among programmers to develop Android and iOS mobile applications using reactive-style views. From Startups and SMBs are adopting React Native to turn mobile app ideas into reality using React Native technology. It was launched in 2015 by Facebook. Being a Javascript framework, it uses the bridge, under the hood, to invoke the native APIs in Objective C for iPhone and Java for Android.
So, this was a general overview of Felgo, Flutter, and React Native. It’s time to bifurcate them.
Felgo vs Flutter vs React Native: What’s the difference?
Since we have a basic idea of Felgo, Flutter, and React Native, I’ll compare them based on the below-mentioned criteria.
(1) Programming Language
(2) Supported Platforms
(3) Development Tools
(4) App Performance and Compiled code
(5) Programming Language, Code Comparision, and Development
Programming Language
Felgo uses QML for developing cross-platform applications. It was designed from scratch, that focuses primarily on UI development. QML is a scripting language that combines C++ and Javascript.
Flutter, developed by Google, uses a Java extension called Dart to omit the context switch and reduce performance issues. The syntax of Dart is relatively easy to understand, but still, Dart seems to be a rarely used language.
React Native uses Javascript, a very well-known scripting language of the web community. Javascript is considered to be a dynamic language that is very easy to learn and implement. As Javascript is popular and comfortable to use by most developers, it’s relatively easy to adapt React Native. Dart and QML also have great futures, but they are still less known in the community.
You may also like to read;
React Native vs. Flutter vs PWA: Which One is the Best Cross-Platform Mobile App Framework
Supported Platforms
Futter supports Web applications, Android, and iOS.
Felgo works on Android, iOS, various Desktop platforms like Linux (Ubuntu), Mac OS, Windows, and embedded platforms based on Linux such as Arduino & Raspberry Pi.
The applications developed by React Native programmers mainly focus on iOS and Android, although you can share your code with the Web applications. You can try exploring desktop applications also, by using Experimental Community extensions.
Development Tools
While using Flutter, you build your applications with VS Code or Android Studio.
Flutter also supports Hot Reload.
Felgo uses well-featured IDE, which extends the popular Qt Creator. It also has a visual UI editor, which gives you the facility of drag and drop. It supports Live Reloading, because of which you can view your changes immediately on your device.
While working with React Native, the support is limited for the tools. However, you can choose the text editors from VS Code, Sublime, or Atom. The process for designing the UI using React Native is similar to web development. It also supports Live Reloading.
App Performance and Compiled code
The performance of the applications directly impacts the User Interface.
The performance of Flutter applications is not compromised because of custom rendering. As Dart uses a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) for code compilation ahead-of-time, we can say that Flutter follows the same approach.
Since Felgo uses custom rendering, it’s rendering is not slowed down. The interactions between the native and runtime environments are reduced, which helps increase performance. To compile your code to C++ at the runtime, Felgo uses the Qt Modeling Language (QML) engine.
Using Qt Quick Compiler, you can choose to enable the ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation for better application performance.
As we know, React Native uses a swift and speedy JIT compiler. It requires a Javascript bridge for communicating with the native realm: whenever there’s a change, React Native compares it with its current Javascript state. If it finds the difference, it propagates to the native realm. React Native is trying to solve such a performance bottleneck using Virtual DOM’s approach, which will reduce the amount of transferred data through the bridge.
Programming Language, Code Comparision, and Development.
So far, we have a high-level overview regarding our topic Felgo vs Flutter vs React Native. Now, it’s time to look at the code in these various frameworks.
Here I will write a simple code for printing ‘Hello there!’ in all three frameworks.
How to say “Hello there!”?
Felgo
import Felgo 3.0
App {
NavigationStack {
Page {
title: qsTr("This is a Felgo App")
AppText {
anchors.centerIn: parent
text: "Hello There!"
}
}
}
}
The first import line lets us use all the components from Felgo SDK. Defining NavigationStack allows us to navigate through various pages of the application.
This is a basic example of Hello there! Application, consisting of just 12 lines of code. You can see the changes immediately on your device by using Hot Reload.
Flutter
The implementation of the Flutter application is relatively verbose but pretty straight-forward too!
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
void main() => runApp(DemoApp());
class DemoApp extends StatelessWidget {
@override
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
return MaterialApp(
title: 'This is a Flutter App',
home: Scaffold(
appBar: AppBar(
title: Text('This is a Flutter App'),
),
body: Center(
child: Text('Hello There!),
),
),
);
}
}
The very first line states an essential difference between Flutter and Felgo. We need to import Material widgets only. The material components are designed especially for Android’s native look. It can be used under any platform, but it won’t give a good look. You can import Cupertino components for iOS native looks. As these components have various APIs, they need code paths. A separate UI implementation is required for providing native looks for both platforms.
React Native
Moving forward towards React Native.
import React from 'react';
import { Text, View } from 'react-native';
function DemoApp() {
return (
< View
style= >
< Text >Hello there!< /Text >
< /View >
)
}
export default DemoApp;
The implementation of the React Native application is quite simple. You need to import the relevant libraries and compose the user interface using JSX. The application comprises 15 lines of code. Just like Flutter, you need to import different widgets for iOS and Android. Since the components are mapped with their native platforms, you can’t use everything for both platforms.
Now you’re familiar with how do these frameworks work under the hood.
You have known its programming language & code, app performance, development tools, and supported platforms, from which you can identify the pros and cons of these frameworks. The question is, what should be your key considerations for choosing your framework from Felgo vs Flutter vs React Native.
Felgo vs Flutter vs React Native: What are its key considerations?
To know which one you should choose from these frameworks, you need to ask yourself a few questions and consider their answers for choosing your tool.
(1) Do you want to reuse your current codebase?
If yes, then choose the framework that helps you with reusing your codebase. For that, your tool should support the same language as your current codebase.
(2) Are your developers familiar with any particular technology?
If yes, then it will be challenging to learn another tool from the start. Felgo provides training sessions and workshops for developers to begin. React Native also has a larger community and efficient documentation to help beginners. On the other hand, Flutter is relatively less established, but you can still get your hand on it and start learning.
(3) Do you intend to have absolute consistency with your OS, or it’s okay to have flexibility?
The answer to this question can drift your perspective away or towards native development. React Native lies in the middle; the custom rendering of Flutter and Felgo is advantageous in this case.
(4) Do you want an optimized application for each platform, irrespective of time & cost?
If yes, then choose native and develop your application for different platforms. You will have the freedom to use the latest features, native widgets, and services rather than finding solutions for implementing it in a cross-platform way.
(5) Do you target Embedded or Desktop Applications?
Then Felgo indeed has the chance! You can simply cross-compile our application to any of the platforms.
The best framework depends on your requirements primarily. So, you need to figure out what you want, and then it’ll be relatively easy to choose your best tool from Felgo, Flutter, and React Native.
Conclusion
I hope this blog post has helped you cleared your doubts about these cross-platform app development frameworks of 2021. If you are planning to hire dedicated developer for any of these cross-platform app developers, be it Felgo, Flutter, or React Native, get in touch with us, our experts, to understand which one is an ideal platform for your business. Experts at Bacancy Technology will ensure the best solution for your requirements and will provide the best possible assistance with problem-solving approaches. Get in touch with us to know more.
