Firstly, Swift and Flutter, are two hot-in-demand technologies. These technologies are for companies and organizations to consider developing an iOS app. How do the two technologies compare themselves? Secondly, Will a native technology be able to compete with a cross-platform hybrid one? How to choose which one is perfect for your application development needs? Flutter Vs Swift, Let us find out?
According to Statista, mobile apps have bought in total revenue of $462 billion for the year 2019. The two popular apps stores being Play Store and the App store closely offer. According to Hootsuite, all of these apps are consumed by about 4.5 billion internet users worldwide.
Particularly, it would be a good opportunity for many growing businesses to be a part of this trend. Let us check which technology can easily help you make a better deal. In this blog, we compare and contrast solutions provided by Two Giants, Google and Apple. Therefore let us dive deep and find out which is best for you, Flutter Vs Swift.
What is Swift?
Swift is Apple’s answer to programming technologies for iOS. Swift, the successor for Objective-C used by Apple. Therefore its offered to developers in order to create their own applications. These applications run on iOS powered devices. Due to the extension of Swift by SCADE, it can now support the development of Android and Windows applications as well.
Swift launched in 2014, and since then has gone through several updates and improvements. The latest release of 5.3.1 came about 13, November 2020.
What is Flutter?
According to Google, Flutter, a cross-platform UI toolkit designed specifically for allowing code reuse between operating systems like Android and iOS. It is open-source as well as free and is based on the Object-Oriented programming language called DART.
Google invented both Flutter and Dart. Dart was released in 2011 while Flutter was released in 2015. Flutter allows developers to create two similar versions of your applications at the same time. Due to its platform-agnostic nature, Flutter uses a single code base to work for both Android and iOS.
While Swift is a programming language, Flutter is basically a platform, that combines Dart and the widget concept to build intuitive applications.
Flutter Vs Swift, Why should you compare the two?
Like indicated before, one is a programming language, and the other is a toolkit platform. They both are upcoming and popular solutions for mobile as well as web development. You can use any of them, they both deserve credit and are apt for development.
Many years of experience indicate that you don’t need a platform native solution to develop a good application. Especially when you think to widen your offering for the public, and deliver the same application across different platforms. So which is better and is apt for your business. Let’s dive deep and find out!
How to compare and contrast Flutter Vs Swift?
We shall use 10 factors to compare these technologies. When the question is about UI, it’s important how well and well your app works with the platform’s native features and functions. The speed of coding is also important for high time-to-market applications as well. This goes hand in hand with cost and efficiency. The performance provided by the app tells you how capable the app is with regard to your platform potential and device capability. Community support provides help when you need answers to your doubts and questions. It helps you tackle challenges in an easy and efficient manner.
The stable state of the application is responsible for providing a reliable experience to the user. Comprehensive and easily understandable as well as accessible documentation helps and supports the development process. The maturity provided by the platform helps performance and stability. The overall cost of development is important for business needs. Finally, the overall talent pool and amount of developers impact the maintenance and development of your app as well as the costs.
User Interface:
- Because Swift is a native developed language, there will be no issues for you to implement any native iOS features for your interface.
- The overall user experience will be closer to iOS as possible. Therefore you will require to create each and every feature from the ground up and from scratch. Even UI needs to be created from scratch.
- When you use Flutter you will have plentiful UI elements to try with. To give you an example, you can use Material and Cupertino widgets to start with.
- Usually, you will not need any backing or support from Swift. From the point of view of the user, the UI created using Flutter will be indistinguishable compared to Native Swift.
- The entire UI will be similar and there will be no differences for you to debate on.
Speed of Coding:
- Swift is exceptional and quick for creating an iOS app right from scratch or the beginning.
- Moreover, it works well but making changes in code takes more time and effort.
- However, swift developers claim that development time is cut short and boosts the application development efforts easily.
- The initial build of an iOS application is smooth.
- Compared to Flutter is supported with multiple widget options as well as libraries, navigation, and testing tools that accelerate and boost the speed of coding.
- Flutter developers don’t need to pay attention to polishing UI elements. This is because flutter does it for them automatically.
- The HOT RELOAD capability provided by Flutter shortens the time to see the recent changes done to code.
- Modifications are therefore much quicker.
- When you compare the same code written in Swift for an application, it requires fewer lines of code to achieve the same app function in Flutter.
Performance:
- Moreover, Swift is a native language for iOS app development has a serious advantage to it.
- You can easily count on better performance for mundane tasks that needs the help of massive computational power and efficiency it. Such as Games and Real-time chat applications.
- When it comes to fully utilizing the true capabilities of the platform Swift can be an apt choice for you.
- This does not mean that Flutter falls behind. Firstly, Dart uses the concept of a garbage collector.
- Secondly, its compiled ahead of time which means that it allows for faster and quicker communication with the specific smartphone device.
- Unless you really require to make the most use of the iOS platform, Flutter will perform as well as Native Swift language.
Community and Support:
- The Swift community revolves around the provided Swift.ORG platform and organization.
- When you compare the stats for GitHub, there are over 830 contributors to Swift and close to 2600 active watchers for the thread.
- Moreover, you will find about 230 thousand questions that are tagged using the word SWIFT on the most popular code and query exchange platform Stack Overflow.
- Even the figures indicated for Flutter provide an equally good insight. Watched about 3400 on Github with about 770 active contributors for Flutter.
- The number of questions that are tagged Flutter is less than 70 thousand. It happens, there are fewer issues with flutter.
- The total flutter community always watches the Google groups and the various other forums such as Slack.
- Being open-source, Flutter is more community-friendly.
Stability:
- Even though both of these technologies are relatively young and immature, they don’t cause many issues with stability.
- All of the components of the platforms are maintained by professionals who claim to use them every day on a daily basis.
- On paper, Swift being a native technology for iOS app development should be more stable and easily reliable than flutter.
- But that’s the only case when it’s possible for you to find and hire a TOP-Notch swift developer who has years of experience in the development and designing of iOS apps. This will help you to get the most out of apple’s platforms and solutions.
Read More: Pros and Cons of Swift for iOS Development
Documentation:
- Both of these technologies have provided thorough documentation that is available on their official websites. These are easily accessible for developers and programmers.
- For Swift, you should check Apple’s developer documentation through swift.org platform.
- And for Flutter, you need to check Flutter.dev, both provide comprehensive documentation materials to developers and programmers online.
Platform Maturity:
- Even though these platforms are relatively new and young, it does not indicate that they are immature.
- Apple focuses on gaining many years of experience using Objective C and migrated the good qualities that this technology had into the Swift language for use by developers.
- Before releasing Swift, Apple incorporated many good things and improvements from Objective C into Swift.
- Google also counted upon years of development experience before launching Flutter. There have some consistent thought processes behind it.
Cost of Development:
- Both of these technologies are open source in nature. So you do not need to shell out extra money to use these platforms.
- With the competition of experienced developers, hiring effective developers having knowledge is now easier than ever.
- If you consider developing an iOS app the total cost will not be more or huge.
- However, for similar price offerings, you can target more users by developing two apps using Flutter.
- One for the Android platform and the other for iOS platform, at no extra cost to you.
Developers Pool:
- There are equally good talent pools available for good professional developers for you to hire.
- Both Flutter and Swift provide talent pools for companies and organizations looking to hire talented expertise.
- Swift is popular among 6.1% of developers while Flutter comes in at about 3.7%.
Also Read: Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Flutter for Mobile App Development
Conclusion
So we have highlighted out the similarities and differences between Flutter Vs Swift technologies for you. You should consider the hard fact that Swift enables you to develop for iOS while Flutter allows you to develop for both iOS and Android.
If you are looking to develop iOS or Android app using Flutter or Swift, contact us at enquiry@nimapinfotech.com with your requirements. You can Hire Flutter Developer from Nimap Infotech.
