Flutter vs React Native vs Xamarin for Cross Platform Development

Cross platform app development frameworks allow you to run the same code on different operating systems. In this article, we examine why you might choose developing cross platform mobile apps over native development, technologies for cross-platform development, and how these technologies compare to each other.

Namely, we compare Flutter vs React Native vs Xamarin — three of the most popular mobile app cross platform frameworks. We want to consider their structure, tooling, and the kind of applications you can develop with them.

Cross-platform mobile app development tends to get a bad rap for a number of reasons. Until very recently, there weren’t any adequate technologies for cross-platform development, and the ones that were available simply weren’t good. They limited developers’ abilities and took a serious toll on application performance — sometimes so much so that the hassles of cross-platform development could no longer be justified.

But despite the drawbacks, people continued choosing cross-platform development over native development because it can offer a number of benefits:

• Shortened development cycle. With cross-platform development, it’s possible to share up to 96% of code across several platforms. Naturally, this results in a much shorter development cycle: instead of developing two separate apps you only develop one, then share that code among operating systems, making platform-specific adjustments as necessary.

• Cost efficiency. Cross-platform application development is undoubtedly cheaper: you pay fewer developers for fewer hours of work, and for many startups that seals the deal. 

• Smaller team. Cross-platform development requires fewer developers because you don’t need to hire separate teams with iOS and Android-specific knowledge.
• Simplified testing process. A smaller code base needs fewer tests and allows QA engineers to spend more time on each element of the application, resulting in higher quality test coverage.
  
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