In the past couple of years, mobile application development has transformed into a blasting industry. Nearly 3.5 billion people in the world are using smartphones and applications to carry out everyday tasks. Today, for online business mobile app development is necessary. If you want to increase your sales with technology then app development is genuinely suggested for everyone.
A decade ago, you could build a native application. The main drawback of this was- you had to spend twice the development cost to make applications for iOS and Android platforms. But now, with the availability of broad cross-platform development options, developing two applications using a single codebase become more popular. There are some competing mobile app cross-platform tools available. Other than PWA and Hybrid, Google’s Flutter and Facebook’s React Native are among the most notable ones. The two main advantages of cross-platform application development is a rapid development process and reduced cost. As there are a lot of frameworks available to build cross platform apps, most of the entrepreneurs get confused about choosing the best between Flutter and PWA. Before making the comparison, let us understand the basics of both frameworks.
Flutter is an open-source mobile app development framework to develop high-performance, high fidelity mobile apps for both android and ios platforms. Flutter apps are written in Dart language which can be compiled to JavaScript. The major components of Flutter are Dart platform, Flutter engine, Foundation library, and Design-specific widgets. Using Flutter framework, you can easily build user interfaces that smoothly react in your application as it reduces the code required to synchronize and update you application’s view. Within a short time, Flutter has become very popular on GitHub and has gathered plenty of stars.
PWA(Progressive Web Apps) belongs to a completely different app category, but they can open on mobile devices too. These are the web apps that can be run within a browser. So, they are cross-platform because you can open them on almost any device including desktops and mobiles. Generally, PWAs are developed using web technologies like HTML+CSS+JavaScript(and JS frameworks like Angular or Vue). Twitter Lite and Uber are among great PWA examples.
Three Key Points of PWAs–
Flutter uses Dart programming language. Dart is a fully object-oriented programming language and as it has a C-based syntax style, it is easy to learn. Also, Dart can be compiled to ARM and x86 code, and with the newer version of Flutter, you can even expect to be able to transpile it to JavaScript so that your Dart code can successfully run on the web.
Progressive web applications are like the new standard of web and there is not a strict rule as to what programming language it must be coded in. However, as it’s still fundamentally a technology from the web, web-based languages like JavaScript are still basic to the PWA development.
Flutter is a new language and can seem somewhat more complicated at first time, as everything, from the UI to logic code can appear more or less mingled together in Flutter. Also, since everything is basically a widget in Flutter, you can be in circumstances where you end up with an unusually enormous, deep, and complex ‘widget tree’.
As you know, PWA is based on JavaScript, an old and mature language, you can expect the learning curve to be more forgiving because there are numerous JavaScript frameworks and libraries available for you to choose from.
As Flutter is specifically made for cross-platform development of mobile apps, it has more features than that of PWA. Flutter apps have more deep integration with the system and hence can use more native features of the device. User experience of Flutter is better as it adopts a pixel-perfect philosophy with which users from android and ios platforms can experience the same experience.
Flutter applications are more consistent across devices but a typical flutter app size is larger than a typical PWA. A simple “Hello World!” flutter app can be 7MB in size while a PWA with the same content never breaks the 1MB mark.
For performance, Flutter and PWA are toe-to-toe with each other and not a one-sided match as one would expect. When compared with a Flutter application, a PWA should have a tad of performance hit when attempting to ‘talk’ legitimately to native code- as the PWA mostly need to use a JavaScript bridge to access the hidden features of the device, e.g., GPS, camera, and so on.
It is clear that JavaScript frameworks like NodeJS can perform on-par, if not better than Dart on some occasions. This is owed to the fact that JavaScript can better use the multicore nature of modern CPUs and distribute workloads more efficiently. A new module worker_threads is introduced by NodeJS and it allows the use of threads for parallel execution of JavaScript processes, JavaScript can better handle CPU-intensive workloads and can beat Dart.
If your user base is mostly available on iOS, that prefers a fast performing app, you must choose Flutter. It will allow you to launch app with native look & feel and gives you an opportunity to generate revenue by using in-app purchases and other monetization options.
If you have a low budget and doesn’t have a dedicated user base on iOS devices, then you can choose PWA to improve user experience within budget.