We have to admit that we cannot imagine our life with applications. Right from the moment, we wake up till we sleep again, we get surrounded by a plethora of applications.
Nowadays the mobile application market has been increasing rapidly and businesses are implementing digitalization in their operations with high featured and cross-platform compatible mobile applications.
The cross-platform application allows developers to use a code to create a mobile app for multiple platforms. In the earlier days of cross-platform app development, developers only had a flutter and react-native frameworks to build apps on the android and iOS platforms.
Now Kotlin has entered the competition. So there is a big confusion for the users which platform one must use for cross-platform app development.
Here we will have discussed both the platforms that will help you to choose the right one for you.
Kotlin Vs Flutter – An Introduction
Kotlin is a programming language and Flutter is a framework. In May 2019 Google officially stated that it supports Kotlin for
mobile app development for the android platform. The interesting part is that Flutter, an open-source web application development framework, is developed by Google itself.
What is Flutter: Released in 2015, the flutter is an open-source SDK that helps developers in creating native-looking apps, web and desktop apps in a single codebase.
It is compatible with iOS, Android, Web and desktop.
What is Kotlin: Kotlin is rapidly emerging as one of the most popular languages, after Java.
Released in 2010 with a small project, Kotlin can be ideally used for iOS, Android, Web, desktop and backend development in Java framework like Spring.
Kotlin Vs Flutter: Let the Battle Begin
Here are some key metrics that furnish a quick comparison of both platforms.
Performance:
Flutter: It gives the hot reload functionality to its users, to make different changes in the backend and depicts the frontend concurrently.
Kotlin: This programming language gives the multiplatform functionality to compile the code explicitly in the same format. It allows the best and customized performance comparable to native apps.
UI-Experience:
Flutter: This language allows developers to take the help of different widgets in app development to create customized as well as effective mobility solutions.
Kotlin: It gives libraries to developers for creating an app without restriction. It allows developers to create an app that is unique and excellently aligned with your vision.
Pricing and testing support:
Flutter and Kotlin, both are open source platforms and hence free to use, thus they are equal in terms of these metrics.
But, both are different from each other when it comes to testing.
Flutter provides a variety of testing features including unique widget testing features, whereas Kotlin provides firebase to offer secure backend options.
Pro and cons for Flutter:
Pros:
Hot Reload Functionality: One of the major advantages of Flutter is that it provides hot reload functionality that helps developers make the best decision for different elements of the app.
Quick Development and low Cost: Flutter offers a single codebase functionality which helps to reduce the time and cost of development.
Customizable: Flutter offers widget features to developers that help them to customize the apps for users with different features.
Cons:
App size: The framework size of Flutter is quite big as compared to another industry player in the competition.
Rare coding language: Dart is easy to learn, but the major concern is that most of the developers do not know about it in depth.
Pro and Cons Kotlin:
Pros
It’s not a framework: Kotlin is not a framework it is an SDK, and it means that you need not have to shift your complete app. Developers start the app with a single module and progressive migrate different components.
Simple language: Kotlin is a simple language to learn just like Java, Swift, Scala and groovy and it is helpful to design cross-platform apps.
Excellent UI experience: There are no restrictions to create an app in such a manner. Developers can work on a design, appearance, and other things similar to native apps.
Cons:
High development cost: Though the platform is easy to use and because it delivers multiple semi-native functionalities, the cost of building mobile apps gets expensive.
Limited libraries: The Kotlin has few basic libraries available to work and developers can work with limitations. The kotlin is still in an experimental stage.
Requires knowledge of tech stack: Kotlin multi-platform does not replace all APIs out there. And developers must know each APIs and platform to work with this language.
Conclusion: Both platforms are free to use and have different functionalities and feature list in itself, so it’s not clear to say, what is the best picture to opt for your vision? It depends on your app requirement what type of application you want to build.
It is advisable to concern the mobile app development expert because both platforms are reliable and aim to decrease the cost and time of cross-application development.
