The Cross-Platform Promise

The appeal of cross-platform mobile development is obvious: write once, deploy to both iOS and Android, cut your development costs roughly in half. Both React Native and Flutter deliver on this promise to a large degree — but they do it differently, and those differences matter a great deal depending on your project.

React Native: JavaScript All the Way Down

React Native, maintained by Meta, lets you build mobile apps using JavaScript and React. If your team already knows React for web development, the learning curve is minimal. Components map closely to their web equivalents, and the mental model is familiar.

Where React Native Excels

Shared talent pool. Web developers can become productive React Native developers quickly. If your company already has React expertise, React Native dramatically reduces onboarding cost.
Code sharing with web. Business logic, API integrations, and state management can often be shared directly between your web and mobile apps.
Ecosystem maturity. React Native has been around since 2015. The ecosystem of third-party libraries is enormous, and most common use cases have well-maintained solutions.
Over-the-air updates. With tools like Expo's EAS Update, you can push JavaScript changes to users without going through the App Store review process.

Where React Native Struggles

Performance ceiling. For graphics-heavy applications — games, complex animations, real-time video processing — React Native's JavaScript bridge can become a bottleneck.
Native module complexity. When you need to access device features that do not have a pre-built library, writing native modules requires knowledge of Swift/Objective-C and Kotlin/Java.

Flutter: A Different Approach Entirely

Flutter, maintained by Google, takes a fundamentally different approach. It does not use native UI components at all — instead, it renders every pixel itself using its own high-performance graphics engine (Skia/Impeller). The language is Dart.

Where Flutter Excels

Performance. Because Flutter renders its own UI, it consistently achieves 60fps (and 120fps on capable devices) even with complex animations. There is no JavaScript bridge to create bottlenecks.
Pixel-perfect consistency. Your app looks exactly the same on every Android device and every iOS device, because Flutter is not relying on platform UI components that differ between manufacturers.
Expanding beyond mobile. The same Flutter codebase can target Android, iOS, web, macOS, Windows, and Linux. The multi-platform story is genuinely stronger than React Native's.
Hot reload. Flutter's hot reload is exceptionally fast, making the development experience feel snappy.

Where Flutter Struggles

Dart adoption. Dart is not widely known outside the Flutter ecosystem. Hiring Dart developers is harder than hiring JavaScript developers, and your web team cannot simply cross over.
App size. Flutter apps tend to be larger in download size because they bundle the rendering engine.
Platform feel. Because Flutter does not use native UI components, apps can sometimes feel slightly "off" on a given platform — subtle things like scrolling physics and text rendering that users may notice subconsciously.

How to Choose

Here is a practical decision framework:

Choose React Native if:

Your team already knows JavaScript and React.
You want to share logic between a web app and a mobile app.
Your app is content-driven (news, e-commerce, social) rather than graphics-intensive.
Over-the-air updates are important for your release strategy.

Choose Flutter if:

Performance and animation quality are critical to the user experience.
You want truly pixel-perfect design control across platforms.
You are targeting desktop and web alongside mobile.
You are starting fresh and have no existing JavaScript codebase to leverage.

What We Use at Project360

We default to React Native with Expo for most of our client projects. The primary reason is talent: our team has deep JavaScript and React expertise, which means we can move faster and maintain apps more cost-effectively over the long term. We also frequently work with clients who already have a Next.js web application, and being able to share business logic between platforms is a genuine advantage.

That said, we have delivered Flutter projects for clients with specific performance requirements, and we are comfortable with both. The right choice depends on your project, not our preferences.

The Conversation Worth Having

If you are planning a mobile app, the framework decision is important — but it is downstream of a more important question: what does your app actually need to do, and who is going to build and maintain it? Start there, and the framework choice usually becomes obvious.

We are happy to talk through your specific situation. Book a free discovery call and we will give you our honest recommendation.