Greetings!
I have been searching lately for frameworks to build mobile apps.
We are trying to make something like a quiz app as a way for customers to contact us. I considered Ionic and React Native because we use JavaScript most of the time in websites, e.g., Vue.js/Nuxt.js. But Flutter seems a decent choice as well, especially since you can use Android/iOS-like components. We are looking for something that works in the long term, something that's time and cost-effective, especially when paired with backend services like Firebase or a GraphQL server. I would like to know your opinions and recommendations. Thank you!
I would definitely go with Flutter. I have been writing native apps in iOS (Objective-C/Swift) and Android (Java/Kotlin) for over 6 years. For public-facing apps, we have generally written and maintained 3 code bases (iOS, Android, Web), so we have tried cross-platform solutions, including Ionic and React Native. React Native was definitely better than Ionic, but still lagged significantly behind native, in terms of performance. Flutter is a game-changer. I have been tasked with writing a public-facing app to help users identify fish species. It is backed with AWS Amplify (AppSync/GraphQL). I was able to write a platform-aware UI, with native-looking elements in less time than it would have taken me to write it natively for a single platform. It looks like with just a few UI and backend tweaks, we will also be able to deploy it for Web. I haven't run tests to confirm, but performance appears to be at least as good as native. Here are some additional benefits when using Flutter/Dart with VSCode:
- easy to set up and start coding
- easy to integrate/manage dependencies
- hot reload across multiple devices, on save
- auto-formatting
- quick-fix suggestions for syntax, etc. errors
I think in the long term Flutter would be your best bet, I work with both flutter and react native daily and I am constantly finding reasons why flutter is better then RN, some general things I've found with flutter are the following:
- User base is growing massively and a lot of companies are switching over to flutter
- Performance is much better than React, both usage and compile times.
- Managing framework updates with Flutter is a breeze and not so great with React.
