Flutter vs Xamarin: A Comparative Guide for Business Owners

 A brief overview of the technological and enterprise backing of Xamarin and Flutter looks like this:

Backed by Google and released in 2017, Flutter is simultaneously one of the newest and most promising multiplatform development platforms on the market right now.

Enthusiastically supported by developers thanks to its highly optimized and streamlined processes, it is yet to reach the full “production-ready” status. Still, as Flutter is quickly approaching maturity, it has already been used to create several official applications by Alibaba, Tencent, Nissan, Reflectly, as well as several Google apps.

According to the TIOBE Index, C# is currently the sixth most popular programming language in the world. This is undoubtfully thanks to the massive popularity of the .NET development framework, which includes Xamarin as its part.

While not nearly as widespread as Java or Android Studio, C# is appreciated by many and has its undeniable perks.

The combo of C#, .NET, and Visual Studio IDE often makes Xamarin the framework of choice for first-time mobile developers who are used to the stack. This tendency will also likely intensify with the upcoming .NET 5, expected to bring about further consolidation of .NET framework and its parts, Xamarin included.

Thanks to its integration with .NET and the long history of development with Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android, even highly unique native mobile apps can be created with C# without a single line of Swift or Java code needed. At the same time, XAML and Xamarin.Forms can increase code reusability up to 96% with their native, clean and fairly simple UIs.

With a background in C#/.NET, any new Xamarin developer can learn the ropes in a matter of days. Picking it up becomes a perfectly manageable task also thanks to a variety of options to learn C# and Xamarin, such as through extensive documentation, books, online and offline courses by Microsoft and third parties, Xamarin forums, Stack Overflow, etc.

Flutter development isn’t tied down to a specific IDE, so your team is free to choose between Android Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, or Visual Studio Code. All of these options are free of charge and easy to set up.

Both Xamarin and Flutter support native APIs and libraries, and have access to a multitude of platform-specific features.

Xamarin provides a 100% native API access:

• Xamarin.Essentials library grants easy access to overlapping native APIs of Android, iOS, and UWP. Abstracted into a set of cross-platform APIs, they can be accessed from shared codebase of Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin Native apps alike.

• Xamarin Native allows access to all platform-specific APIs and allows their full use for cases not covered by Essentials.

Xamarin and Flutter have very different approaches to UI design.

In Xamarin, you use platform-specific native UI components, no more, no less. This can be achieved by creating:

• Completely separate UIs for platform-specific apps, using Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android. The benefit of this is achieving greater fidelity, flexibility, and a completely native look of cross-platform apps. The downside is no shared UI code, which significantly brings down the portability and overall code reusability of your apps.
• A Xamarin.Forms app, using shared native elements and interfaces, and thus achieving code shareability of up to 96%. The downside of Forms is that their capabilities are rather limited, even though they’ve been gradually expanded lately. Still, for many platform-specific and dynamically changing elements, you’ll have to dip into using native or Xamarin Native code.

Up until very recently, any developer with experience in both Xamarin and Flutter would have named the development speed and streamlining of Flutter miles ahead of Xamarin’s. All thanks to the Hot Reload functionality that allows developers to immediately see the changes made to the code on a virtual or real device right as they’re coding. Hot Reload is a great feature that boosts productivity as well as aids in quick prototyping, experimenting, and testing.

This year though, Xamarin’s team implemented two similar features, XAML Hot Reloading and Hot Restarting, into their most recent stable release, closing this gap and eliminating one of the clear advantages of Flutter over Xamarin.

You’ve likely heard about Fuchsia. It’s been making waves: a high-profile project by Google, rumored to become the next big thing in mobile and desktop worlds alike. The platform was designed to not only succeed and supersede both Android and ChromeOS, but also to support all existing Android apps. Combine it with Flutter as the default framework for building new Fuchsia apps, and Google’s upcoming platform starts looking like a major force to be reckoned with in the near future.

It’s still too early to tell for sure, but it might be that Google is aiming to use its fresh new Flutter framework as a way to smoothen the eventual transition from Android and ChromeOS to Fuchsia. To boot, Google might use Fuchsia and Flutter as leg-ups for each other in the competitive fields of mobile app development. If Fuchsia is to be all it’s rumored to become, then Xamarin might be in some trouble, just like React Native, Ionic, and other popular frameworks.

Rumors aside, we don’t really know much about Fuchsia yet. What will it be exactly? Will it become a success? Google has a history of both gigantic hits and miserable flops with their ambitious projects. The tech juggernaut also has a habit of quietly dismissing products that haven’t found massive success, sometimes within a few months from their initial release.

No official rollout date for Fuchsia is in the air, but 2024 is the most speculated-upon date. In mobile development, three to four years is practically forever, so pushing through a plan to mitigate Fuchsia’s launch might seem premature for the Xamarin team right now.

Still, if Fuchsia is to succeed, Flutter will no longer be just another cross-platform development framework but will gain a massive boost in popularity as a native development tool for Google’s new major platform.