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Flutter vs Kotlin: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this comparison, we will explore the key differences between Flutter and Kotlin.

  1. Performance: Flutter, being a cross-platform UI framework developed by Google, offers high-performance rendering with its native-like widgets and GPU-accelerated UI. On the other hand, Kotlin, being a programming language, does not directly influence the performance of the application, but it can be used with frameworks like Android Studio to enhance performance.

  2. Platform Support: Flutter is known for its extensive platform support, allowing developers to build applications for iOS, Android, and web platforms using a single codebase. Kotlin, on the other hand, is primarily used for developing Android applications, although it can also be used for other platforms with some limitations.

  3. Learning Curve: Flutter has a relatively steeper learning curve compared to Kotlin. It requires developers to learn Dart, the language used to write Flutter applications, which might add some initial learning time. Kotlin, on the other hand, is an easier language to pick up for developers already familiar with Java, as it is fully interoperable with Java, and most Android developers have prior experience with Java.

  4. Development Speed: Flutter offers hot-reload functionality, allowing developers to see the changes in real-time without having to recompile the entire application. This feature significantly speeds up the development process and enables faster iterations. Kotlin, although not directly providing a hot-reload feature, can be used with Android Studio, which offers similar functionality for app development.

  5. Community and Ecosystem: Kotlin benefits from being supported by JetBrains, a well-known name in the development tools space. It has a large and active community, which means plenty of online resources, libraries, and frameworks to leverage in Kotlin development. Flutter, while still growing, already has a dedicated community and a growing ecosystem, but it might have fewer resources and libraries compared to more established platforms.

  6. Native Integration: While Flutter offers a wide range of widgets and UI components, it may still require native integration for specific platform-specific functionalities. Kotlin, being primarily used for Android development, allows for seamless integration with native Android APIs, which can be beneficial for leveraging platform-specific capabilities.

In Summary, Flutter and Kotlin have their own strengths and unique features. Flutter provides platform flexibility and high-performance UI rendering, while Kotlin offers a familiar language for Android developers with strong native integration capabilities. The choice between the two would depend on the specific requirements of the project and the skillset of the development team.

Advice on Flutter and Kotlin
Nikhilesh Goyal
Senior Embedded Engineer at GreyOrange · | 5 upvotes · 496.9K views
Needs advice
on
FlutterFlutterReact NativeReact Native
and
UnityUnity

Hi Friends, I am new to #MobileAppDevelopment and I need to make a #CrossPlatformMobileApp. I want guidance regarding which tools should I use to build a mobile app. Main requirements: integrate Unity game engine and provide a platform for social chats.

Past experience - C++ and Python

I have tagged Flutter and React Native but if anything better than both please suggest them.

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Replies (3)
Sahil Singh
Product Manager at AutoVRse · | 10 upvotes · 451.9K views
Recommends
on
UnityUnity

Hey, If you are using Unity you are going to have to do the end to end development on Unity, you can directly build for android and iOS on Unity. I dont see how Flutter or React Native fit into this equation. Unity is a standalone engine. As for Social Chats, you could use Firebase or your own API and integrate that in Unity in C#

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Recommends
on
UnityUnity

I agree with Sahil. If Unity is a requirement, best way is to use just that to create your app.

If you really want, it should be possible to use Flutter and Unity together. Using Flutter Unity Widget. Although I wouldn't recommend it just yet. It's too early days.

If you do end up using it, I would be very interested in reading about your experiences.

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Mathieu Grenier
Recommends
on
UnityUnity

You can start by small steps with Flutter and after Unity. Flutter = best choice to build a small cross-platform mobile app. With or no flutter, use directly Unity. Y'll have complete control but it's harder for new mobile developers. Keep in mind, the requirement is Unity!

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Needs advice
on
DartDart
and
KotlinKotlin

Can anyone help me decide what's best for app development or even android Oreo development? I'm in a state dilemma at the moment. I want to do Android programming, not necessarily web development. I have heard a lot of people recommend one of these, and it seems that both the tools can do the job. Which language would you choose?

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Replies (4)
Ondrej Malek
Recommends
on
DartDart

I assume that you mean Flutter by Dart. I have over 6 years experience programming in Android SDK, but about 1,5 month in Flutter. So far I think that Flutter is the future for mobile development. Flutter SDK is much better designed. Ecosystem of libraries seems having much higher quality. I would even say that android opensource libs are having really poor quality. Many times I am wondering how can garbage like that have so many stars at GitHub. Android SDK is hard to compose so you reinvent even basic things on and on, which is totally different story at Flutter. Lolcycle? Both are having good documentation. I quess apps in Flutter can be done in 1/3 of time compared to develop AndroidSDK and iOS, its design is that much better and contemporary. As of language comparison - Kotlin is better, but the difference is not that important. Go from one language to other is no problem. Dart is being updated with new features.

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Recommends
on
DartDart

I've selected Flutter and Dart for my side projects and never regretted. Dart learning curve is easy after any OOP language . Flutter as a framework is also has a low entry threshold. I've already started development after a week of learning. Pros for me: code can be build for Android and IOS devices (for ios you need mac or VM), apps written in Dart have great performance on each of these platforms, flexibility. Cons: if you want to build a product as a business and want to hire a new Flutter Developer in the future it can be a problem as the framework and language is not popular for the moment.

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Tran Phuc
CTO at Nextfunc Co., Ltd · | 3 upvotes · 275K views
Recommends
on
DartDart

I have worked in mobile development since 2010. I have experienced myself on various techs including Native SDK (Android), React Native (from 2016) and Flutter (2018). Almost the apps nowadays can be built using cross-platforms frameworks like React Native or Flutter. I suggest you start with Flutter. Flutter SDK is designed well to speed up your development and it still keeps the quality for your apps. If you're familiar with OOP languages (Java, C#...), switching to Dart is really quick and easy. Of course, sometimes you will need to dive deep into native parts but almost the cases you don't need. Good luck!

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Ranjeet Sinha
Senior Software Engineer · | 3 upvotes · 274.9K views
Recommends
on
KotlinKotlin

It depends on what is the purpose of your app development. Do you want to make one app that shares the codebase for both iOS and Android? If yes, then Dart is the way to go. Does your app include interacting with hardware features like camera, Bluetooth, if yes, then go for native Android for better performance? Dart is good for simpler UI apps where you just do basic crud operations over the network and show data but if you need richer UI experience go with native.

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Needs advice
on
FlutterFlutter
and
React NativeReact Native

Hi, I'm a web dev and am using Electron for a desktop app. Now I have to develop a mobile app with the following features:

  • Posting/uploading files by users, private messaging between users, download files, moderation of the uploads, push notification of new posts.
  • Mods can ban users and delete files.
  • Share buttons from the library folder of the user phone.
  • When a user uploads a photo, a pencil tool for deleting staff on the pic.

Which tool is better for such a project?

Thanks in advance

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Replies (2)
Lee Dydo
Technology Development Manager at Outform · | 5 upvotes · 400.4K views
Recommends
on
React NativeReact Native

Given your experience in electron I think the shortest hop is going to be React Native. Especially since half of the requirements are server-side. Google is doing a pretty great job bringing up Flutter and the tooling is pretty great. For me however, dart seemed like quicksand and not everything is in its final home. React Native is mature, and considering my cursory analysis of your experience and the low complexity of this project, you've got quite a lot of room to grow into Javascript Land. Ultimately, my recommendation is always "play with both, see what you like, and get to know the documentation and the community." Keep your head on a swivel and set aside time to peek greener pastures, but spend most of your time delving deeply into what you're already doing.

But yeah, go with React Native first, get bored of it, learn what the shortcomings are through experience and then see if something else is really more attractive or just a new shiny.

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Varun Sharma
CTO at Nugen Computer & I.T. Services · | 5 upvotes · 400.3K views
Recommends
on
React NativeReact Native

Well, I will personally recommend to go for React Native as I have worked in both of them. React native has big community and it is easy to opt as compared to Flutter. There no doubt about the fact that Flutter is a great framework for developing both Android/IOS apps. However, you should have some experience to go for the same. Both will require prior knowledge as for React Native you have to go through Javascript first with which you are already familiar and for Flutter you need to go through Dart. So being familiar with Javascript you should go for React Native. You can go expo which has lot of inbuilt functionalities for the React Native developers.

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Needs advice
on
FlutterFlutterIonicIonic
and
React NativeReact Native

Hi, we are an early startup (with an iPOC prototype) but need to get started on our MVP, and our tech developers in India recommended a hybrid, and they use Ionic, then we spoke with a software company in the US and he recommended Flutter or React Native. Any advice or input for us on the differences between these? Our app will need Bluetooth GPS for "near me" and social media sharing reviews capability, and also link on the backend with businesses. Thanks in advance for any help you can give!

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Replies (6)
Ahmad Khan
Recommends
on
FlutterFlutter

I would never recommend you to go with Ionic, Because of the User experience it provides is subpar. Flutter is most promising, Can be easily used to develop great user experience in no time. React native is also good, but it's phasing out in my opinion, while Ionic has already phased out. Flutter also provides great developer experience, resulting in fast and productive developers. I would have to press hard to think of a CON about flutter when recommending it for your needs.

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Dario Alves
Arquiteto de Software at Senior sistemas · | 2 upvotes · 521.6K views
Recommends
on
React NativeReact Native

Maturity, Community, Facility, Libs React Native is the principal platform of mobile cross-platform development today, Flutter is it's a promise.

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Recommends
on
FlutterFlutter

Flutter is built on DART which is written in GO. GO compiles to binary. Hence is faster than any java based framework. It provides superior performance and has a simplified UI process for designing apps.

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Recommends
on
IonicIonic
at

I don‘t have practical experience with flutter but between ionic and react native I‘d say both a perfectly viable options and we have used both for a number of production apps. We normally go with ionic on capacitor because we build a lot of pwa/web apps so we can use the same code for all. We don‘t use much of ionic elements, we do most styles on our own.

The comments that the user experience is bad I cannot agree with. A well designed and developed ionic apo can hardly be distinguished from a native app. But obviously that depends also on the usecase and type of app.

I hope this helps

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Nicolas Kovacs
Recommends
on
FlutterFlutter

Even if React Native is older (I didn't say mature) you should go for Flutter, It's works really well and the developer experience is great (auto-completion, plugin etc). I spent years with React Native and now I am using Flutter and I don't regret It. Even if you have to learn a new language, It's pretty simple even more If you know some OOP, Java and Javascript ES6 syntax in some case. One other advantage is the facility to design app in Flutter, you have widgets for everything and you can adapt any design made by your designer. For example you can't make a simple custom box shadow with React-Native ...

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Kevin Lücke
Recommends
on
FlutterFlutter

It depends also on your team skills. Flutter is fast to learn, fast to develop with and the performance is much better in comparison to React. If your team is already highly skilled in React Native it could be the better option - if not Flutter is my 100% recommendation. We rapidly prototype and deliver MVPs with Flutter since two years.

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Alexis Poveda
Needs advice
on
ElectronElectronFlutterFlutter
and
IonicIonic

Hi! I have to develop a software solution for a youth church group, for my graduation project. In the first meeting that I have with the coordinators, they did not have a clear idea of what they want. The biggest problem they have is the attendance control, they do it manually and that causes errors.

I was thinking of developing an Android app in Android Studio because that is the tool I master, but a friend told me that I consider using a tool that builds for iOS, Android and web. I have like 6 months. I own a MacBookAir but I do not know Swift (for iOS). I am familiar with MySQL, PHP, Apache, JSP,HTML,CSS.

Summary: What tool can I use that is easy to learn and easy to scale?

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Replies (5)
Recommends
on
IonicIonic

It's probably not relevant anymore, but I think Ionic with Angular as the frontend is the right choice. For IDE I would choose Visual Studio Code. You can just create a basic web application with responsive design, which is already included if you are going to use Ionic components with Material Design to create your app. You don't need to know Swift, you don't even have to create mobile apps, just create a responsive (Ionic already is) web app, or PWA. Upon browsing your website from a mobile device for example using google chrome, you will be prompted to create a shortcut of the website in your mobile phone. After you do this, there will be an icon in your phone that looks like an icon to launch an app, it will launch your website in full screen mode - for the user's perspective it will look like he is using a native app. Access https://ionicframework.com/docs/angular/pwa from your android chrome browser, go to tab options (3 vertical dots), click on Add to Home screen. When you launch the website from the shortcut, you'll see that it behaves and looks like a native app.

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Recommends
on
IonicIonic

I think you should chose between Flutter and Ionic. With those two options, the main question is about graphs and performance. Are they really important for your application? If the answer is yes, your tool is Flutter but, if the answer is that you need an easy tool to create an app with some basic components I would choose Ionic. You have a library with lots of components that you can use and they have native UI by default (for Android and iOS).

You will find more support if you use Ionic with Angular as frontend framework (you have the option to use Vue or React but this is a new feature for Ionic and I think there are more difficult to learn than Angular).

You can develop and debug the majority of features on PC (I don't know if that is possible with Flutter). And when you will finish the app, create iOS and Android versions is simple.

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Recommends
on
FlutterFlutter

Flutter is easy to use and easy to understand. Once you have completed the android platform, you can easily build it to ios, Web or desktop on a single code base.

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Carlos Esteban Lopez Jaramillo
Recommends
on
IonicIonic
  1. Electron is for desktop apps, so not useful for you.
  2. Flutter has better performance, but Ionic is decent as well, I would use Ionic unless you're making a game or graphic-intensive app.
  3. Ionic is more flexible since you have the whole NPM ecosystem available, while flutter is more recent, thus libraries for it are less in quantity and battle-tested than the ones in NPM.
  4. Ionic 4 introduced CSS variables, which improved immensely the theming process for the app, which was the hardest issue Ionic development had.
  5. Ionic has extended to many frameworks so it's compatible with Angular and React frameworks, meaning more flexibility, personally I would recommend Ionic with Angular over React since it's more suited to enterprise-level apps.
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Alejandro Ulate Fallas
Mobile Developer at Build SRL · | 2 upvotes · 319.3K views
Recommends
on
IonicIonic

Hi there. So Electron embeds everything in a webview, which means that what you would have to develop would be a Node project most probably. Ionic does the same (kindof but won't bore you with specifics) but it does it much more efficiently. Usually you do Ionic apps with JS frameworks like Angular or React (this one recently added). Flutter on the other hand does native apps, it does it really good but it's support for Web is in beta and it's relatively simple to setup if you already know the SDK and the environment.

My recommendation would be that you do your app using Angular/Ionic if you reaaally need the multi-platform environment and there's different reasons in this case:

  • Since it's a graduation project you need it to be as simple as it can be and adding a new technology adds to the learning curve.
  • Flutter is great if you have different complex UI or if you have specific performance needs that require native support and in your case it does not seem like you need that.
  • Flutter is also an incredibly powerful tool but it's learning curve might be tricky if you have not developed native apps before so I wouldn't recommend you start off like this if you have time sensitive projects like a graduation project. It does have great docs and an awesome community but I'd suggest you stick as close to what you know as you can.
  • Ionic/Angular uses Typescript (a type javascript wrapper) and Angular (JS framework) so you will have to learn a little bit but if you already know HTML, CSS and Javascript you won't have that much of a hard time. Also there's quite a lot in terms of documentation and tooling already tested around this combination.
  • Ionic/Angular has a really good CLI that helps you stick to the architecture they recommend so you wouldn't have to worry about it that much.
  • Ionic/Angular helps you test either locally in the web browser as well as your devices which is in the end what you want if you are looking for a multi-platform system. Flutter also does this but is not quite in a stable state (yet!).

Anyway, in the end, if you go for the multi-platform suggestion I think, because of time you would be better off with Ionic. If you decide that you don't need that as of right now (which is fine as well) you can start with just the Android app and plan on the different things you might eventually need like a website or other different stuff. Cheers!

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Decisions about Flutter and Kotlin
Thuan Nguyen
FE Lead at SOLID ENGINEER · | 5 upvotes · 647.1K views
  • 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.
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awesomebanana2018
Chose
FlutterFlutter
over
IonicIonic

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.

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Nick Skriabin

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.

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Alaeddin Alzeybek
Head of Engineering at Volt Lines · | 1 upvote · 227.5K views

From cross platform development point of view: Using kotlin multiplatform is more convenient than java for implementing cross platform code, since it can be converted to be used in iOS (swift) projects, and it can be easily learned if you already know swift. It still an experimental feature but it helped so far to unify a lot of the common code between our iOS and Android projects. And it is more future proof than java regarding support and maintain multiplatform converting.

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Nick Parsons
Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream · | 11 upvotes · 165.5K views

I work at Stream and I'm immensely proud of what our team is working on here at the company. Most recently, we announced our Android SDK accompanied by an extensive tutorial for Java and Kotlin. The tutorial covers just about everything you need to know when it comes to using our Android SDK for Stream Chat. The Android SDK touches many features offered by Stream Chat – more specifically, typing status, read state, file uploads, threads, reactions, editing messages, and commands. Head over to https://getstream.io/tutorials/android-chat/ and give it a whirl!

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Pros of Flutter
Pros of Kotlin
  • 143
    Hot Reload
  • 123
    Cross platform
  • 105
    Performance
  • 89
    Backed by Google
  • 73
    Compiled into Native Code
  • 61
    Fast Development
  • 58
    Open Source
  • 53
    Fast Prototyping
  • 49
    Single Codebase
  • 48
    Expressive and Flexible UI
  • 36
    Reactive Programming
  • 34
    Material Design
  • 30
    Dart
  • 29
    Widget-based
  • 26
    Target to Fuchsia
  • 20
    IOS + Android
  • 17
    Easy to learn
  • 16
    Great CLI Support
  • 14
    You can use it as mobile, web, Server development
  • 14
    Tooling
  • 13
    Debugging quickly
  • 13
    Have built-in Material theme
  • 12
    Target to Android
  • 12
    Good docs & sample code
  • 12
    Community
  • 11
    Support by multiple IDE: Android Studio, VS Code, XCode
  • 10
    Written by Dart, which is easy to read code
  • 10
    Easy Testing Support
  • 9
    Target to iOS
  • 9
    Real platform free framework of the future
  • 9
    Have built-in Cupertino theme
  • 8
    Easy to Widget Test
  • 8
    Easy to Unit Test
  • 1
    Large Community
  • 73
    Interoperable with Java
  • 55
    Functional Programming support
  • 51
    Null Safety
  • 46
    Official Android support
  • 44
    Backed by JetBrains
  • 37
    Concise
  • 36
    Modern Multiplatform Applications
  • 28
    Expressive Syntax
  • 27
    Target to JVM
  • 26
    Coroutines
  • 24
    Open Source
  • 19
    Statically Typed
  • 19
    Practical elegance
  • 17
    Android support
  • 17
    Type Inference
  • 14
    Readable code
  • 13
    Powerful as Scala, simple as Python, plus coroutines <3
  • 12
    Better Java
  • 10
    Pragmatic
  • 9
    Lambda
  • 8
    Better language for android
  • 8
    Expressive DSLs
  • 8
    Target to JavaScript
  • 6
    Used for Android
  • 6
    Less boilerplate code
  • 5
    Fast Programming language
  • 5
    Less code
  • 4
    Native
  • 4
    Less boiler plate code
  • 4
    Friendly community
  • 4
    Functional Programming Language
  • 3
    Spring
  • 3
    Official Google Support
  • 2
    Latest version of Java
  • 1
    Well-compromised featured Java alternative

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Cons of Flutter
Cons of Kotlin
  • 29
    Need to learn Dart
  • 11
    Lack of community support
  • 10
    No 3D Graphics Engine Support
  • 8
    Graphics programming
  • 6
    Lack of friendly documentation
  • 2
    Lack of promotion
  • 1
    Https://iphtechnologies.com/difference-between-flutter
  • 7
    Java interop makes users write Java in Kotlin
  • 4
    Frequent use of {} keys
  • 2
    Hard to make teams adopt the Kotlin style
  • 2
    Nonullpointer Exception
  • 1
    Friendly community
  • 1
    Slow compiler
  • 1
    No boiler plate code

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What is Flutter?

Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.

What is Kotlin?

Kotlin is a statically typed programming language for the JVM, Android and the browser, 100% interoperable with Java

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What are some alternatives to Flutter and Kotlin?
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.
Android SDK
Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.
Java
Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!
React
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.
See all alternatives