Evaluating the mobile development frameworks Apache Cordova and Flutter and their impact on the development process and application characteristics

Mobile application development is an area of software engineering with its own unique development approaches and challenges. The market for mobile applications is highly fragmented, not only across different mobile operating system platforms but also across devices and operating system versions within the same platform. The goal of any application developer is to reach the largest possible audience while minimizing development time, cost, and effort. The current market consists of two major platforms, Android and iOS. Without the use of cross-platform tools it would be necessary to produce the same application twice to reach both marketplaces. A number of cross-platform development frameworks a reavailable to developers and each one has its own benefits and drawbacks. This paper details a comparison between two cross-platform development frameworks, Google’s Flutter and Apache Cordova with the Ionic framework. In order to compare the two frameworks against each other and against the experience of developing native applications for each platform, an application prototype was developed using four different frameworks. A task management application was developed as a native Android application, a native iOS application, a Flutter cross-platform application, and an Apache Cordova cross-platform application using the Ionic user interface framework. A series of source code and application performance profiling evaluations were performed in order to determine the impact of choosing a cross-platform development framework on both the development experience and the performance and perceived quality of the deployed applications. Several areas of qualitative differences between the development experiences of Flutter and Cordova are also detailed.