React Native, Flutter or Capacitor - The Cross Platform Showdown

#reactnative #flutter #capacitor

I’ve built the same app with Capacitor, React Native and Flutter - here is an honest comparison of the 3 most popular cross platform frameworks!

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00:00 About the Comparison
01:58 Capacitor, React Native and Flutter explained
10:04 Capacitor Review
15:18 React Native Review
21:00 Flutter Review
25:33 Simons Cross Platform Recommendation

[galaxies_dev]

Now you want to learn React Native, Flutter, or Capacitor? Awesome!

[jesusnavas]

Good review Simon, greetings from Venezuela!!!

[imwalidsalhi]

Magnifique! Keep diversifying content like this, it’s very interesting. Have a good day!

[bbsoftdev]

capacitor with vuejs can add feature camera preview in div element ?

[ralexs]

Great comparison! Great video! as usual!

[elsoncarlossilva]

Great video!
I`ll be interested in the best ways to create wearables apps video in the future.

[Xeneon]

I'm more curious if there is one option that offers developers the most flexibility when it comes to creating creative UI/UX design patterns? I want to develop a mobile app that has a similar UX to Calm. Is there one that is better than the other for this?

[AnthonyDev]

Great video, Simon. Well, I used Ionic since the first version and since that time I am subscribed to your content, but in 2021 I searched something different to learn and now I am in the Flutter world.
RN I gave up when I was learning about navigation and drawers and I was not enjoying it. Flutter is fun. Respect to Ionic and Capacitor. 😎

[aytunch]

Great and unbiased comparison. I totally agree with your opinions on Flutter. The mobile apps done with Flutter is on par with swift&kotlin apps in terms of performance and even better UI since you have control over every single pixel.

[carmelshores]

Hamburg calling. If I understand correctly React Native and Capacitor allow hot-fixing without needing to go through another App Review process, say, for an iPad app?

Such as requests to change styling or change options in a form dropdown?

[felicianvass]

Hi Simon! Another great video. What do You think about Framework 7 + Capacitor?

[go]

You can use any native code with Expo. I don't see a downside using Expo at current moment.

[Alex-bcxe]

As a beginner into mobile dev should I start with flutter or directly with native development (swift ui)?

[MarshallMT]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Simon. Personally I still prefer Ionic over Flutter, it's way easier with Angular compared to Dart 😅. You mentioned in your video about Capacitor and the possibility to release an hot fix without passing through Apple approval process, how do you do that? Thanks, happy coding :)

[justpatrick_]

I totally feel you about the endless number of options and figuring out required in react land. Honestly it frustrates me everyday. As a vue guy forced to write react since react native depends on react, I cannot express how much I miss the simplicity of the vue ecosystem and the straight forward state management.

[luczztem]

awesome review brother, the most complete I've seen, helped me a lot to decide between Angular + capacitor or Flutter (I don't even consider React 🤢🤮). Although I love Flutter standart widgets (they are beautiful) and it's developer speed, I'll stick with Angular + Capacitor given that I already know Angular and it enables me to make 4 apps with the same codebase (Android, IOS, WEB, Desktop). Greate video bro!

[samucancld]

in ionic 7 I solved it adding server:{clearText:true} in the ionic config file 👍

[pchasco]

I’m using flutter, but if I could invent my perfect framework, it would be Angular, but with Flutter widgets. Dart is Ok, but I prefer typescript. And I prefer the architecture of an Angular application, especially the separation between the template and the logic. Flutter code just gets messy and I find it difficult to maintain clear boundaries between UI and logic, despite all my best efforts. That being said, Flutter looks and performs So much better than Ionic. The Ionic team have done an amazing job, but an Ionic app lives right there in the uncanny valley between a native looking app and a web app.

[hamm]

In all of these videos, everyone leaves out that flutter also compiles to MacOS, Windows, Linux, and Embedded systems from a single code base (also web, but it's not there just yet). Try doing this with some monorepo using electron and ionic or electron and React Native and you are building yourself an amazing foot gun. The amount of wasted dev time maintaining such a monster of a repo is insane. With Flutter, you get this all for free.

I'm normally quite conservative when it comes to a framework in a different language than JavaScript, but I'll be honest, I really think Google has a winner with Flutter. Once Flutter Web gets 20% better, I really think we're in a for a new age of the web. Especially since Chrome used to (and maybe still does) have native dart bindings. Who knows what google has planned.

[coding-]

Time to add Quasar to the showdown and compare it along with these 3 frameworks.

One can argue that it would be similar to that of capacitor, but the comparison of developer experience with using vue would be interesting.