Compose vs Flutter

Overview

Compose

Stacks258

Followers121

Votes206

Flutter

Stacks17.7K

Followers16.8K

Votes1.2K

GitHub Stars173.7K

Forks29.4K

Compose vs Flutter: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this markdown, we will discuss the key differences between Compose and Flutter.

Rendering Engine: Compose is built on top of Android's native rendering engine, while Flutter uses its own custom rendering engine called Skia. This means that Compose leverages the power of Android's rendering capabilities and is tightly integrated with the native platform, whereas Flutter provides a consistent cross-platform experience with its own rendering engine.
Declarative UI: Compose follows a declarative programming model, where the UI is described as a function of the current state. It allows developers to describe what the UI should look like based on the current state of the application. On the other hand, Flutter uses a reactive rendering approach, where the UI is continuously rebuilt whenever there is a change in state. This allows Flutter to provide high-performance animations and smooth UI transitions.
Language: Compose is written in Kotlin, which is the official language for Android development. This makes it easier for Android developers to adopt Compose as they are already familiar with Kotlin. Flutter, on the other hand, uses Dart as its primary programming language. While Dart is not as widely used as Kotlin, it provides features like hot reload and a modern syntax.
Platform Support: Compose is specifically designed for Android app development and is tightly integrated with the Android platform. It leverages the existing Android APIs and libraries to provide a seamless development experience. Flutter, on the other hand, offers cross-platform support and can be used to develop apps for Android, iOS, web, and desktop platforms. It provides a unified codebase for developing and deploying apps on multiple platforms.
UI Customization: Compose provides a flexible and customizable UI toolkit that allows developers to create their own UI components and widgets. It provides a rich set of APIs and tools for extending the default set of UI components. Flutter, on the other hand, comes with a comprehensive set of pre-built UI components called widgets. These widgets can be easily customized and styled to match the desired UI design.
Tooling Support: Compose benefits from the existing Android development ecosystem and tooling. Android Studio, the official IDE for Android development, provides excellent support for Compose, including code completion, debugging, and layout preview. Flutter, on the other hand, has its own set of development tools like Flutter SDK, DartDev, and Flutter Inspector. These tools offer features like hot reload, widget inspector, and performance profiling.

In summary, Compose is tightly integrated with the Android platform, follows a declarative UI approach, and is written in Kotlin, while Flutter provides cross-platform support, uses its own rendering engine, and comes with a comprehensive set of pre-built UI components.

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Advice on Compose, Flutter

Nick

CTO at Pickio

Jun 2, 2020

Decided

We built the first version of our app with RN and it turned out a mess in a while. A lot of bugs along with poor performance out of the box for a fairly large app. Many things, that native platform has, cannot be done with existing solutions for RN. For instance, large titles on iOS are not fully implemented in any of existing navigations libraries. Also there's painfully slow JSON bridge and many other small, yet annoying things. On the other hand Flutter became a really powerful and easy-to-use tool. A bit of a learning curve, of course, because of Dart, but it worth learning. Flutter offers TONS of built-in features, no JSON-bridge, AOT compilation for iOS.

491k views491k

Comments

Anonymous

CEO at ME!

Jun 7, 2020

Decided

While with Ionic it is possible to make mobile applications with only web technologies, Flutter is more performant and is easy to use if you are willing to learn Dart, which is a fun language. Plus, it has awesome documentation and, while its ecosystem isn't near as big as JavaScript's is, it has a good package manager called Pub and its packages are generally high quality.

403k views403k

Comments

Thuan

FE Lead at SOLID ENGINEER

Jun 16, 2020

Decided

Javascripts is the most populated language in the world.
Easy to learn & deployed production
Fast development
Strong community
Completed Documents
Native performance with lower RAM used.
Easy to handle native issues by using native code like Java / Objective C
Powered by Facebook.

666k views666k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Compose	Flutter
Compose makes it easy to spin up multiple open source databases with just one click. Deploy MongoDB for production, take Redis out for a performance test drive, or spin up RethinkDB in development before rolling it out to production.	Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.
One click, production-ready, cloud hosted MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL and RethinkDB, with additional databases in beta. Every deployment features: database autoscaling based on data size usage; private VLAN, IP whitelisting, SSL, full-stack monitoring, custom alerts; HA and fault tolerance with automatic failover; enterprise-grade SSD; easy to add plugins including New Relic; daily, weekly and monthly backups at no additional cost; availability on multiple data centers; a global support team to troubleshoot problems quickly; dedicated servers available.	Fast development - Flutter's "hot reload" helps you quickly and easily experiment, build UIs, add features, and fix bug faster. Experience sub-second reload times, without losing state, on emulators, simulators, and hardware for iOS and Android.;Expressive UIs - Delight your users with Flutter's built-in beautiful Material Design and Cupertino (iOS-flavor) widgets, rich motion APIs, smooth natural scrolling, and platform awareness.;Access native features and SDKs - Make your app come to life with platform APIs, 3rd party SDKs, and native code. Flutter lets you reuse your existing Java, Swift, and ObjC code, and access native features and SDKs on iOS and Android.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 173.7K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 29.4K
Stacks 258	Stacks 17.7K
Followers 121	Followers 16.8K
Votes 206	Votes 1.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros 42 Simple to set up 32 One-click mongodb 29 Automated Backups 23 Designed to scale 21 Easy interface	Pros 149 Hot Reload 126 Cross platform 107 Performance 90 Backed by Google 74 Compiled into Native Code Cons 29 Need to learn Dart 11 Lack of community support 10 No 3D Graphics Engine Support 8 Graphics programming 6 Lack of friendly documentation
Integrations
SoftLayer Heroku Amazon EC2 DigitalOcean	Android SDK Firebase Dart

What are some alternatives to Compose, Flutter?

Ionic

Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

React Native

React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.

Xamarin

Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

NativeScript

NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.

Apache Cordova

Apache Cordova is a set of device APIs that allow a mobile app developer to access native device function such as the camera or accelerometer from JavaScript. Combined with a UI framework such as jQuery Mobile or Dojo Mobile or Sencha Touch, this allows a smartphone app to be developed with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

MongoLab

mLab is the largest cloud MongoDB service in the world, hosting over a half million deployments on AWS, Azure, and Google.

Framework7

It is a free and open source mobile HTML framework to develop hybrid mobile apps or web apps with iOS native look and feel. All you need to make it work is a simple HTML layout and attached framework's CSS and JS files.

Qt

Qt, a leading cross-platform application and UI framework. With Qt, you can develop applications once and deploy to leading desktop, embedded & mobile targets.

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is a web platform that exposes native mobile device apis and data to JavaScript. PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova. PhoneGap allows you to use standard web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development, avoiding each mobile platforms' native development language. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device's sensors, data, and network status.

Expo

It is a framework and a platform for universal React applications. It is a set of tools and services built around React Native and native platforms that help you develop, build, deploy, and quickly iterate on iOS, Android, and web apps.

Related Comparisons

Compose vs Flutter: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this markdown, we will discuss the key differences between Compose and Flutter.

Rendering Engine: Compose is built on top of Android's native rendering engine, while Flutter uses its own custom rendering engine called Skia. This means that Compose leverages the power of Android's rendering capabilities and is tightly integrated with the native platform, whereas Flutter provides a consistent cross-platform experience with its own rendering engine.
Declarative UI: Compose follows a declarative programming model, where the UI is described as a function of the current state. It allows developers to describe what the UI should look like based on the current state of the application. On the other hand, Flutter uses a reactive rendering approach, where the UI is continuously rebuilt whenever there is a change in state. This allows Flutter to provide high-performance animations and smooth UI transitions.
Language: Compose is written in Kotlin, which is the official language for Android development. This makes it easier for Android developers to adopt Compose as they are already familiar with Kotlin. Flutter, on the other hand, uses Dart as its primary programming language. While Dart is not as widely used as Kotlin, it provides features like hot reload and a modern syntax.
Platform Support: Compose is specifically designed for Android app development and is tightly integrated with the Android platform. It leverages the existing Android APIs and libraries to provide a seamless development experience. Flutter, on the other hand, offers cross-platform support and can be used to develop apps for Android, iOS, web, and desktop platforms. It provides a unified codebase for developing and deploying apps on multiple platforms.
UI Customization: Compose provides a flexible and customizable UI toolkit that allows developers to create their own UI components and widgets. It provides a rich set of APIs and tools for extending the default set of UI components. Flutter, on the other hand, comes with a comprehensive set of pre-built UI components called widgets. These widgets can be easily customized and styled to match the desired UI design.
Tooling Support: Compose benefits from the existing Android development ecosystem and tooling. Android Studio, the official IDE for Android development, provides excellent support for Compose, including code completion, debugging, and layout preview. Flutter, on the other hand, has its own set of development tools like Flutter SDK, DartDev, and Flutter Inspector. These tools offer features like hot reload, widget inspector, and performance profiling.

Compose vs Flutter

Overview

Compose vs Flutter: What are the differences?