SWIFT VS FLUTTER: IOS

SWIFT is fast and safe type programming to develop iOS apps with native tools created by Apple INC. SWIFT took language ideas from Objective C and many others. On June 2, 2014 the Apple WorldWide Developers Conference application became the first publicly released app written with SWIFT.

FUTTER is an open source, multi-platform which builds iOS and Android apps created by Google. The first version of FLUTTER was known as codename “SKY” and ran on Android operating system. On December 4, 2018 the FLUTTER 1.0 was released at the Flutter Live Event denoting the first Stable version of the framework.

The comparable features that both the programming languages possess include:

• Onboarding Process:

FLUTTER uses DART Programming Language and SWIFT uses Objective C as the programming language. In order to develop iOS apps with SWIFT, we need to use XCode as the IDE. We need to just have the macOS machine with  XCode installed. While in FLUTTER we need to have Xcode + Flutter binary installed.

• Profiling:

Profiling is a process of dynamic analysis which measures memory, resources and other performance factors of the apps. Both FLUTTER and SWIFT have great support for profiling the apps. In SWIFT, iOS apps can be profiled using Instrumentation where in FLUTTER, we can profile iOS apps using IDE or Command Line.

• Accessibility:

SWIFT has accessibility in UIKit framework, so there is no need to import another to enable accessibility where as FLUTTER don’t have any mature support to add accessibility, thus use Xcode’s accessibility inspector tool.

• Application Size:

SWIFT apps are generated in .app format and can get the app artifact from CI server where the application’s binary is 23.2MB. Flutter apps are generated in build/iOS/debug iphone simulator directory where the application’s binary is 52.4MB.

• Build Time:

FLUTTER apps appear to take a bit longer time to clean the builds than the SWIFT. The build time of SWIFT or native apps can be measured with XCode or the XCode build command line tool. SWIFT app takes about 13 seconds for clean build where the FLUTTER apps can be build in debug mode and it takes approximately 30-45 seconds for clean build.

• Reloading:

While developing an iOS app it is required to make code changes and test in devices and this process is known as reloading. Once any element is renamed in SWIFT apps, we need to rebuild the app to check whether the changes are reflected in the app. While FLUTTER, there is a hot reload feature that makes changes in the code, reload the app and the changes are reflected in a second.

• Building on CI Server

iOS app building can be different on local machines depending on machine configuration like RAM, disk size etc. As SWIFT is available on Github, we need to login to Nevercode using the Github credentials where in FLUTTER we use Codemagic as the official CI/CD solution.

• Testing Support:

SWIFT provides a XCTest native testing framework for unit, integration, performance and UI testing of iOS apps. As it lacks data driven testing, grouping of tests and some other features are provided by XUnit testing framework like JUnit. On the otherside, FLUTTER provides a solid testing framework at unit, functional and UI level. Widget testing is one cool feature that FLUTTER provides to run UI tests. It provides a separate package, FLUTTER DRIVER to drive these tests.