Summary

• A simple mobile app created 3 different times with:
  • Flutter
  • React Native (Expo)
  • Xamarin (Forms)

All three solutions provide similar UI building experience of using building blocks (Widgets, Components, Xml) to put together a View heirarchy.

App Features

• Simple tab navigation

  • Home - Fetch dadJoke from Dadjoke API
  • History - shows a list of past dadJoke item(s)

• Material Icon for tab images

Measurement

General categories of how I would score each framework based on my experience

• Ease of getting started (boilerplate code, documentation, technical requirements)
• Developer support (open source, community, documentation)
• Developer experience (native support, debugging, flexibility)

TODO:

• Performance comparison
• App artifacts size

Summary

Flutter

• Language: Dart
• Package manager: https://pub.dev/
• Common design pattern: BLoC

Personal Ratings

See the README for more details

Ease of getting started:

• Flutter provides great onboarding experience with the CLI tooling
• Noticeably faster to setup than ReactNative and Xamarin projects

Developer Support:

• There's a lot of activity in the community, comparable to the React Native community.
• Official documentations are very thorough.
• Has good open source libs to use.

Developer Experience:

• Developer docs are very detailed and thorough.
• Pre-packaged debugging tool is very intuitive and easy to understand
• Some widgets provides out of the box support for complex functionality
• Provides great typing system that prevents runtime error

React Native (Expo)

• Language: Javascript/Typescript
• Framework: React
• Package manager: npm/yarn
• Common design pattern: Redux

Xamarin Forms

• Language: C#/F#
• Framework: .NET
• Package manager: Nuget
• Common design pattern: MVVM

Personal Ratings

See the README for more details

Ease of getting started:

• Forced to use Visual Studio IDE. Auto imports felt a bit off at times.
• Boilerplate code wasn't able to be executed right away
  • Forced to have latest XCode version (not backwards compatible friendly)

Developer Support:

• Official documentation was very basic
• A lot of the community posts and questions are outdated
• Limited amount of open source plugins
• Very dependent on Xamarin team to stay up to date with platform changes

Developer Experience:

• Great MVVM support
• Very basic documentation and little to no code documentation.
• Hot reloading only works with XAML changes