The demand for mobile application development is increasing day by day due to the tremendous increase in the customers of the same in recent years. There are over a dozen technology choices available in the market for building mobile applications. Hence, choosing the right technology becomes important in the current scenario. The time is demanding for a technology that offers the development of efficient mobile applications with minimal time and effort.  

When we talk about mobile application development, we often hear the terms Flutter, React Native and Progressive Web Apps as more and more organizations are looking to hire mobile application developers who have expertise in the same. 

Now, the questions that come in our mind at first are: what are they? What features do they offer to contribute towards developing a beautiful, successful and cost-effective mobile application? and which one to choose over the other to fulfill the purpose? Here, in this article, we will try to find out the answers to all the questions mentioned above one by one. Let’s start with a brief introduction of ‘Flutter’ 

Flutter - A Brief Introduction 

Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit that offers application development for Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, MAC using a single codebase. 

It was introduced by Google in 2017. This framework is mainly used for the development of 2D mobile applications. Despite being new in the industry, more than 2000 mobile applications are already developed using this framework. Reflectly, Alibaba, Google adds are a few of the apps developed using Flutter. This framework has a lot to offer to the developer community because of which it has become one of the highly preferred choices for building mobile applications. 

Flutter comprises several excellent features that make it different as compared to other mobile application development frameworks but in addition to these excellent features it has little to no drawbacks that can be negligible. 

Benefits of Flutter 

1. Flutter offers a relatively faster development due to its hot reload feature. The hot reload feature enables developers to see the application changes instantly as and when they make any changes to the code. They do not need to wait for minutes for the same. 
2. To build an app in Flutter, Dart language is used which is easy and very beginner-friendly language hence making the framework easy to learn and use. 
3. It enables developers to create their own widgets as well as to customize the existing widgets to give a beautiful design to the application. 
4. It supports several IDEs like Visual Code, Android Studio, Intellij, etc. hence enabling developers to get started without changing their current IDE. 
5. It becomes comparatively cheaper to develop a mobile application with Flutter as it allows developers to use the same codebase for different platforms. 

If you are planning to build an app for both Android and iOS platforms; flutter is the right platform to choose. Hire Flutter App Developer & get a feature-rich business application. 

React Native - A Brief Introduction 

React Native is a popular cross-platform framework for the development of android and ios applications. It is an open-source hybrid application development framework introduced by Facebook. The use of React Native results in the reduction of the overall time and money spent on the development of mobile applications. A few of the most popular applications build with React Native are Walmart, Instagram, Soundcloud, Facebook, etc. 

Now, let’s have a look into the benefits and drawbacks to React Native. 

Benefits of React Native 

It is an open-source platform. Hence, developers can access it easily. Developers can use their open-source libraries for free to create reliable and efficient applications. 

1. With the use of pre-developed components available in the open-source library, the development process becomes much faster. 
2. It uses javascript as a programming language which is a very popular language in the developer community. Hence, learning this framework is quite easy. 
3. It supports the use of single codebase for multiple platforms hence, the application development becomes economical in terms of time, cost and maintenance. 
4. It allows the use of third party plugins. Hence, developers can make use of predefined user interfaces in the application with or without customizing them. 
5. React Native offers a special feature called hot reload feature that enables developers to see the application changes within sub-seconds of making any changes to the code thus making the development faster.  

Drawbacks of React Native 

1. React Native needs a lot of initializing time. 
2. React Native lacks in the security due to the use of javascript which is an open-source framework. 
3. Lesser inbuilt components as the technology go on evolving. 

Progressive Web Apps - A Brief Introduction 

Because of the issues associated with the app store and play store, the concept of progressive web apps came into existence. A progressive web app is a website that functions like a traditional or native mobile app. This framework can be considered as a suitable alternative for native or hybrid application development frameworks. 

Benefits of Progressive Web Apps 

These applications do not rely on internet connections to work. 

1. As compared to native apps, progressive web apps require a very less amount of mobile data. This is a huge benefit for the countries where mobile data is very costly. 
2. The behaviour of these applications is the same as native applications in terms of interaction and navigation. 
3. The user can save these applications with the corresponding icon on the home screen of his mobile device. Users need not face all the problems associated with downloading the application from the app store. 
4. They are responsive enough to fit various screen sizes like desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile. 

Drawbacks of Progressive Web Apps 

1. The older devices with outdated browsers can not support progressive web apps so well. 
2. High battery usage can be a major reason for quitting the application by the user. 
3. Progressive web apps are not very much compatible with ios devices as Apple has limited the access of progressive web apps on its devices. 
4. Limited support for offline execution. 

Final Words 

To conclude, we can say that Flutter, React Native and Progressive Web Apps have various benefits to offer as well as each one of them has some drawbacks too. They all come with a unique set of features. The selection of a particular framework purely depends on the fact that which framework best meets your needs to create an exciting application. Hence, it is necessary to understand the project requirements in detail before choosing among the three!