The rivalry between Google's Flutter and Meta's React Native has been going on for quite a few years. Both come with a steep learning curve (in my experience) and offer different approaches to building non-native apps and games.
Building a non-native app offers the benefit of not being locked to the platform's framework and language and being able to deploy the app to multiple platforms more easily. It comes at a cost that's more visible in some apps than others - user experience.
I used our SDK Intelligence, where we scan every iOS and Android app and game to see what powers it, to see who's using Flutter and React Native, and how many apps and games started using them every month. Methodology and disclaimers towards the end.
According to the data, Flutter is currently leading in terms of new installs. We count an install when a new app is launched with the SDK or an existing app that wasn't using it before, starts using it.
Between January and July of 2023, 61K apps started using Flutter. In the same period, 32K apps started using React Native.
With a few exceptions, every month twice as many apps start using Flutter over React Native. This trend has been fairly consistent for most of the year.
Also interesting is who's using those. When filtering all apps using Flutter or React Native by the number of downloads, React Native beats Flutter. 704 apps using React Native get more than 100,000 monthly downloads while the number for Flutter is 546. The numbers get close when changing the filter to 1M downloads, where React Native has 60 and Flutter 49.
This race is more than close, and Flutter seems to be a frontrunner.
Our SDK analysis process compares a human-created fingerprint for every SDK against an app's code. The scanner looks at free apps available for download in the US.
You can see which SDKs your competitors are using with App Intelligence and also find all apps using a particular SDK in Explorer.
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