Emerging trends in Multi-Platform App development are gaining popularity for two reasons. One is single code base and wider audience reach, and secondly, less development time and effort. They are also cost-effective and provide native look across different platforms. These trends are driving the entire software market, and it is the optimal time to consider investing in these frameworks. There are few frameworks which serve this purpose such as Flutter, React Native, .NET MAUI and Ionic. This article will cover the aspects of React Native and .NET MAUI.
React Native
In 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram and wanted to use React for their timelines, which was followed by open sourcing React project. Facebook started to develop mobile platform technology and introduced React Native for native look and feel. In order to extend support for Windows, Microsoft created an extension and generated UWP template, which uses WinRT inside React Native code.
.NET MAUI
Microsoft developed VS Code with Electronjs. They observed that electronjs requires a lot of space, since it bundles Chromium and nodejs (for communication with host OS). In the objective of reducing the space and increasing the efficiency, they created a small package called “WebWindow” which uses WebView2 (web control for binding HTML, js, css) and ultimately resulted in better efficiency and lesser space.
The extension of this project along with migration of Xamarin Forms into a separate framework is.NET MAUI which is the Microsoft’s greatest focus area for the current year. It allows developers to run application on any platform. It supports C# and XAML for UI components.
Few developers feel difficult to code in XAML. As a solution to this problem, Microsoft has also provided MAUI with Blazor, where developers can write code using HTML, Javascript and CSS and render them as native application.
Key factors
1. Installation & Setup:
A React Native application is created with just two commands. Using the “expo-cli” npm package, we can scan the QR-code and deploy the build into any physical device. This makes development fairly faster. We can also use AVD (Android Virtual Device) configuration and run it as an Android emulator.
The setup for .NET MAUI needs the developer to carefully follow the documentation. Microsoft has developed a new package called “maui-check” which does all necessary installations like Android SDK, ios SDK , Android emulator (AVD configuration) and the latest dotnet version. We can also install the workloads separately. However, in some cases, where the workload doesn’t install properly, manually installation is advised. Microsoft has promised to add dependencies in the Visual Studio installation. The Visual Studio directly runs on Android emulator connected through AVD with just one click. There is an option to change target platform and run accordingly.
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