The other day, Alexander aka cawfree wrote
this on Twitter: "If you want to deliver a cross-platform MVP fast, use React Native. If you want to deliver a great product, use
React Native slower." Obviously, since Alexander is working a lot
with React Native, it just makes sense that he would endorse it. What is interesting however is the response
this tweet got: "If you want to deliver a great product faster use Flutter" "Until you
discover flutter that is" "Using React Native is like refusing to learn calculus and insisting
on building a rocket" "Old school react native trend flutter". And it goes on, without even making a tweet
about Flutter. So this got me thinking: why is it still all
about this React Native VS Flutter debate when, let’s be honest, both are on the same
side. Now I know you’re probably already thinking
about this in terms of features, community, etc. which is right. But another approach, a smarter approach you
can have to this question I feel, is more future-oriented. What I believe is that, when people engage
in these oppositions, they focus on what can be compared today, but they completely forget
about what’s ahead of us. And when you change your mindset about this,
React Native VS Flutter becomes an absurd debate to have. To understand why this makes no sense, you
actually need to look at the signs from the present. People are using their computers for work,
games for some, and phones, tablets, TV for everything else. And this as you know will keep going this
way. Social media, digital entertainment the way
we know it today, is mostly consumed on phones, many hours a day for most of us. So when I see Flutter or React Native Web
being a huge deal in a world where we are more mobile app-focused than websites, besides
making Progressive web applications, to me this is partly oriented to the past of applications,
not the future. This is good to have, sure, but definitely
not a game-changer in the long run. You could then still argue that based on cross
platform mobile development, Flutter or React Native is better than another, although to be honest,
both do quite well in this field. But let’s say one is better than another. Both of these are not the way of making an
app natively, based on the platform's standards, but they are accepted. If you want my opinion, that is sort of using
Flash back then when you could build a website using different technologies and that was
okay for a long time, but when it became deprecated on Apple devices, it was a matter of a few
years before it’s been entirely eradicated from the web. So you could say, this was a security matter,
but it’s been said that Steve Jobs also had hard feelings about Adobe when doing it,
and then decided to kill one of their products. We know the history Apple has with progressive
web apps and how its standards can vary over time. It would be quite a terrible move to remove
React Native apps tomorrow but look, they could just say, they’re against over-the-air
updates since once you got the user’s permissions for something, you could just send another
app bundle without getting approval from the app stores, and secretly sucking up all a
user’s information. And that could just happen tomorrow for security
reasons. But anyway, let’s say this doesn’t happen. What’s clearly coming after the mobile era,
if not virtual reality, for now, is augmented reality. And we have evidence of this coming in a near
future: where you would see an interface blending in with the real world, taking pictures from
what you see, or even scanning and downloading small apps on the go. Yeah, if that rings a bell to you, that’s
exactly what iOS app clips are for: you scan a QR code, then it downloads a subpart of
an app to quickly interact with the world. AR glasses are coming, and although phones
certainly won’t disappear, phones probably being extensive controls for the glasses,
just like the remote for a TV, the way we make apps is definitely going to change and
we have no guarantee that it’ll still be possible to use React Native and Flutter for
that. So we could ignore this big wave coming straight
on us, that could potentially be the right opportunity for Apple and Google to wash up
these new ways of making cross-platform applications, but I think it’s also good to know that
we are not in charge here. Flutter and React Native are not the industry
standards and have no power over what these devices will be coded with, although we like
to think it does when we see Swift UI for example, and its big similarities with how
React works. There is just no proof of these two giants
working hand-in-hand to make one way of building apps for their next devices, and it’s almost
certain this won’t happen. So rather than debating on which additional
layer based on native is the best today, each one of us should think long term and consider
these solutions as simple toolboxes, each one as useful as the other and adapting to
each type of developer. Let me know what you think in the comments,
and remember to subscribe for more videos. Thanks for watching, and see you next time :)
