Every founder eventually asks me the same question: “Should we build this in Flutter, React Native, or go full native?” I’ve shipped production apps with all three. Here’s how I think about the trade-offs—pulled from real launches, not marketing decks.
Field Notes From Three Stacks
- Flutter: AfCircle and a handful of creator tools. Teams under five, aggressive timelines, lots of multimedia. Monthly active users in the tens of thousands.
- React Native: YC-style MVPs where the frontend team already speaks React and wants to move fast without context switching out of JavaScript.
- Native (Kotlin/Swift): High-performance AR experiments, sensor-heavy apps, and anything where millisecond-level timing matters.
Speed to First Release
- Flutter’s hot reload + opinionated widget tree means I can spin up a branded screen in an afternoon. Dependency management is predictable.
- React Native is quick when your team lives in the npm ecosystem, but I’ve lost days wrangling mismatched native modules.
- Native iOS/Android gives you ultimate control, but onboarding two codebases doubles ceremonies, CI work, and QA load.
Performance Reality
- For everyday product surfaces—feeds, forms, dashboards—Flutter and React Native keep pace with native. Users don’t notice 58 vs. 60 fps.
- Once you dive into AR, realtime audio/video mixing, or advanced sensor fusion, native still wins. That’s when I dust off Kotlin or Swift and go deep.
Team & Hiring Lens
- Small, product-minded teams with mixed backgrounds? Flutter keeps everyone in one repo with a generous component model.
- Shops stacked with React talent who can’t spare a separate mobile crew? React Native is a gentle glide path.
- Enterprises with dedicated platform teams, compliance constraints, or heavy reliance on platform-specific SDKs? Native is the safe bet.
How I Advise Founders
| Scenario | My pick | Why | | --- | --- | --- | | Pre-seed, feature-rich social app | Flutter | Single codebase, strong UI tooling, solid plugin ecosystem | | Web-first startup adding mobile companion | React Native | Share component mindset, reuse design system | | AR fitness product with hardware integrations | Native | Low-level APIs, tighter performance guarantees |
My Rule of Thumb
Start with Flutter unless you have a crystal-clear reason not to. You’ll ship faster, keep your team small, and still hit quality bars. Reach for native when hardware or cutting-edge OS features are non-negotiable. Keep React Native in your toolkit when your org already breathes React.
Pick the stack that matches your team’s strengths and the experience your users expect—not the one that wins Twitter debates.