If you’re planning to learn mobile application development and you’re a beginner in the this field, you might have came across terms like Native Application Development and Cross Platform Application Development. And then you must of have came across the list of programing languages like Java, Kotlin, Swift and Toolkit like Flutter, React Native used in Mobile Application Development. Now you’re trying to decide which programing language or Toolkit to learn, so that it will be relevant in the years to come. In this post, I’ll explain the difference between them.

Native Application Development

If you’re plaining to learn development for only Android or iOS and you don’t care about the other platform, you should choose Native App Development without a doubt. So, now the only question remains is which programing language to choose for Android and iOS. I would choose Kotlin for Android and Swift as these programing languages are newer with respect to their counter parts and are easy to learn and mostly because you can implement same functionality in significantly less lines of code, which will reduce your development time.

Cross Platform Application Development

For Cross Platform Application Development, the two most popular options are Fluter and React Native. Lets explore each of them separately.

What is React Native?

React Native is an open source Mobile Application Framework created by Facebook, initially released in year 2015. It is used to develop Android, iOS, WEB and UWP(Universal Windows Platform) apps, it uses JavaScript for develop which is ranked amongst the top programing languages, so naturally it has a very good community support. Some of the popular apps developed using React Native are Facebook, Instagram, skype.

What is Flutter?

Flutter in an open UI software development kit cerated by Google, initially released in 2017. It is used to develop Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, Google Fuchsia and WEB application, it used Dart programing language which is also developed by Google, although it is new programing language its online community is increasing daily and Google provides very detailed documentation for the same. Some of the popular app developed using Flutter are Google Ads, STADIA, Philips Hue, Reflectly.

Flutter VS React Native

Both have their sets of pros and cons, you can’t go wrong in choosing either of them with that being said, Fluter recently released plugin for Adobe XD (XD to Flutter) which generate the UI code from the Adobe XD design, which will significantly reduce the development time, and is a huge advantage for Flutter and a good enough reason to choose Flutter.

I am going to explore more in details about Flutter and XD to Flutter in the coming blog post, so stay tuned for those.

I hope this blog was helpful for you, please comment down below if have any question.