In this blog, we will let you walk through two popular cross-platform app development frameworks namely: Xamarin vs React Native.
Both the development frameworks will be evaluated on the basis of performance, popularity as well as community support.
Before moving forward, it is imperative to understand what is cross-platform development, Xamarin and React Native?
Xamarin Vs React Native
Cross-Platform Development
Cross-platform mobile app development refers to the process of giving birth to mobile applications for numerous platforms like Android and Ios with the help of single technology stack.
The primary and significant benefit is that instead of developing numerous different versions of your app that is written utilizing the dedicated native language for each platform, what you can do is to write your code single time and then deploy it on several different platforms altogether at once.
Putting Some Light on Xamarin
Xamarin is an open-source & cross-platform mobile app development framework that was founded in the year 2011.
What exactly Xamarin is utilized for?
The primary utilization of Xamarin is for sharing codes and business logics across different platforms. It is also used for writing cross-platform applications in C# with Visual Studio.
Putting some light on React Native
React Native refers to an open-source, cross-platform mobile app development framework that was created by Facebook in the year 2015.
The primary purpose of the framework is to enable and help the developers to utilize JavaScript and then react along with native platform capabilities in order to build and develop mobile apps.
Is Xamarin Better than React Native?
It is finally time to understand if Xamarin is better than React Native and have a comparison between them both.
We will further evaluate the comparison between Xamarin and React Native on the basis of the following criteria:
- Performance
- Popularity
- Development Languages
- Pricing
You can also read: Some facts about Mobile Application
Performance
While choosing a cross-platform development framework, one of the most imperative factors that should be kept in mind is app performance.
React Native & Xamarin, both offers near-native app performances, some are of the view that flutter’s performance is better as the Dart Code is compiled to a C-library that means it is close to the native code.
It further helps in enhancing the speed of communication as well as offers better performance.
Popularity
As there are almost 1.6 million developers across 120 countries, Xamarin has successfully developed a quite good user base over the years. The primary reason behind it is that it is one of the oldest frameworks out there.
From the time it has been released, React Native has surely earned popularity but at a slow pace, surpassing Xamarin in the year 2017.
On the basis of Stack Overflow’s 2020 Development Survey, React Native is more popular and loved as compared to Xamarin. Almost 57.9% of the developers tend to express their interest in continuing to develop with the help of React Native as compared to 45.4% for Xamarin.
Development Languages
Xamarin utilizes net languages like C# and F# that are common languages and can be used to write native platform code.
React Native uses JavaScript that does a fabulous job with React Native apps.
On the basis of the TIOBE Programming Community Index, C# is the fifth-most popular programming language as compared to JavaScript in seventh place.
Hence, when it comes to development languages, both Xamarin and React Native are solid choices as both works with a familiar language that further helps in boosting productivity.
Pricing
No doubt both Xamarin and React Native are free and open-source platforms, Xamarin is free only for small companies and individuals. When it comes to large enterprises, single-user licenses initiate at $499 and go up to $2,999 for a visual studio enterprise annual subscription.
While this is not a serious issue for large enterprises, the costs can still add up which can force bigger companies to go for React Native.
Conclusion
There is no one size fits all scenario when it comes to selecting a cross-platform development tool.
Both Xamarin and React Native have proved to be successful in developing some really good mobile apps.
It entirely depends on your specific needs as well as preferences that help in determining which framework is best suited for you.
For instance, if you possess some prior knowledge about Java Script, then it might be good for you to go for React Native. In the end, it only depends on what exactly you are building and what you want to attain.