Flutter vs Competitors: Popularity
It’s been over 5 years since Flutter released its 1.0 version in December 2018. Today, Flutter officially supports 6 platforms:
- Mobile: iOS and Android
- Desktop: Windows, MacOS, Linux
- Web
In this post, I’d like to compare the popularity of Flutter with other cross-platform mobile development technologies.
Google Trends: Interest over time
Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means that there was not enough data for this term.
I began by comparing the interest in Flutter with that of React Native, Xamarin, .NET MAUI (which is the successor of Xamarin), and Ionic using Google Trends for the last 10 years.
This is the query link for the chart you can see in the picture below. The tool allows us to compare only 5 terms, so I didn’t include Apache Cordova, which is even less popular than Ionic. Also, I didn’t include Compose Multiplatform the data for which will not even reach the value of 1 in this popularity chart.
Stack Overflow Trends: Asked Questions
Let’s also take a look at the number of questions asked on Stack Overflow with the help of Stack Overflow Trends. This is the query link for the chart below.
It tracks interest in programming languages and technologies based on the number of Stack Overflow questions asked per month.
Leaders: Flutter vs React Native
The charts above paint a vivid picture, clearly demonstrating that Flutter and React Native have been significantly more popular in recent years compared to their competitors.
In the table below, you can find additional numbers found on GitHub and other relevant platforms as of today.
The latest stable versions are Flutter 3.19.3 and React Native 0.73.6.
Sources
- https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=31&date=2016-03-17%202024-03-17&q=Flutter,React%20Native,Xamarin,MAUI,Ionic
- https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=flutter%2Creact-native%2Cxamarin%2Cmaui%2Cionic-framework%2Ccordova
- https://flutter.dev/
- https://reactnative.dev/
- https://github.com/flutter/flutter
- https://github.com/facebook/react-native
- https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/xamarin
- https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/maui
- https://ionicframework.com/
- https://cordova.apache.org/
- https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose-multiplatform/
