alt Hacker NewsI still prefer React Native with Expo over Flutter, mostly for practical reasons:
* Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder.
* Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction layer between the app and the platform.
* Performance: Flutter can absolutely be fast, so I would not claim otherwise. My experience, however, is that RN has required less work to get interactions and animations that feel consistently native.
* Ecosystem: RN benefits from the broader React, TypeScript, JavaScript, and native ecosystems. Expo has also improved dramatically and now covers a large part of the usual mobile platform work.
* Platform-specific features: neither framework completely eliminates native code. Things like widgets, Live Activities, Dynamic Island, extensions, NFC, and other platform APIs eventually bring you back to Swift/Kotlin anyway.
* Migration to native: if the long-term destination is Swift and Kotlin, I find RN a better intermediate representation. Its component model and platform integration are closer to native concepts, which also makes the codebase easier for agents to translate incrementally into proper native applications.
That said, these are trade-offs, not claims that Flutter is bad. Flutter has improved a lot, and for teams that want a highly consistent cross-platform UI, its rendering model can be an advantage.
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While all of the points you brought up are valid, I've hated every react native app I've ever had to work on. Not because of react native itself, but because they usually take random react developers to work on these apps and the structure they create is absolutely horrible to work with (compared to, for example, native apps).
What was your experience on that aspect with Flutter?
Funny to see speed in there, my experience is the opposite.
Im a very happy Flutter dev and it's always been odd to see so much negative sentiment around it when there are public discussions.
The biggest negative with Flutter is web. Because most of the UI is canvas-rendered, DOM based tooling like session replay, analytics, accessibility audits, and browser automation require specific instrumentation. That reduces third party choices you have unless you invest in your own tooling and who has time for that. I can't imagine the situation is much better in mobile.
As someone who used all these frameworks professionally for years, I highly agree. Although, I do not prefer Expo due to it's highly annoying build system and dependency hell, but React Native itself in that case. While I understand Google wants a horse in this race, Flutter doesn't feel like a horse to bet on.
- Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java and Javascript and turned them into a language. Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use.
- While there is no Skia anymore, the whole custom rendering of Flutter often caused more trouble than not, from the UI implementation itself all the way to specific low-end chipsets not being supported.
- Ecosystem propagates these insane architectures that don't make much sense and are made to either print apps as fast as possible or to emulate some Clean Code like behavior.
- Web still feels terrible to use, even after all these years.
Since I'm not happy with any of these, I've even taken upon writing a framework of my own that renders into native UI and works with any language (gonna shill it here https://hypen.space). It was inspired directly by years of working with mobile and experiencing the pains of crossplatform development such as Flutter and Expo. We can do better than these!
I have a different perspective because I would put all these points as a negative for React Native except hiring.
React Native is actually Native so you feel all the pain of the yearly redesign by Apple and Google and the millions of different device quirks to manage which will break your app.
You have the Javascript ecosystem which is notoriously janky and hard to maintain over time, even more so as nobody else cares about making it work for React Native, you are a third-tier platform.
Then the performance, Flutter is actually more performant than native for very cheap devices (I've tested it), that's why it's so popular in India.
The language is unified and doesn't feel as ducked tape as Javascript is.
Out of curiosity, do you have any experience with Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform? I would like to know how that compares.
>real native components
Since when does React Native use real native components? Last time I've checked it wasn't capable of doing ANYTHING with my phones NFC scanner or native camera...
With flutter I can just build a Kotlin component and integrate it easily into my app. Also Flutters performance is extremely good, I dont know what you are on about. Our app is used on extremely old phones and has great performance. (I am not even a professional android/flutter dev, so I didnt optimize for performance).
You should try Dart/Flutter again, they've improved a lot.
- Dart. It's richer than JS/TS with stronger type safety, and seems purpose-built for UI. Fewer Dart developers than JS, but I'd argue those JS developers cannot be immediately effective coding React Native (Expo) anyway.
- Emulated components vs. real native components. For multi-platform apps, this is actually desirable. These kinds of apps have their own design system.
- Speed. In my experience, it's negligible, but maybe because I keep using the latest version.
- Ecosystem. Flutter/Dart occasionally introduces "breaking" changes (such as migration to null safety, and recently deprecation of CocoaPods). Community very quick to update their plugins and adapt. Some abandoned plugins were immediately forked to keep being maintained.
- Migrating to native platforms, easier for agents to read an RN project. I'd argue it should be _easier_ to do that with Dart since the language is less "ambiguous" than JS.
However it's not perfect. My complaints:
- Not ideal for web apps with lots of FIRST-time visitors, due to initial download. There are some attempts to solve this, e.g. deferred loading, but I think inherently it's unsolvable since you need to download the whole world (a few MBs) to have the app running on your browser. That's why for this scenario I use SvelteKit. But if you already have a mobile app and want to get a web app "for free", this is a useful feature.
- WebView support is inconsistent across platforms (I'm looking at you, Windows and Linux).
- Text fields are quirky on Android TV.