React Native

React Native or Flutter?

Almost every comparison you will find is written for developers, and argues about things that never reach your invoice. Here is the version for the person paying for the app rather than writing it.

What is actually the same

This is the longer list, and that is the point. Most of what gets presented as a reason to choose one is simply true of both.

Both ship iOS and Android from one codebase

This is the entire reason either exists. You are not paying for an iOS app and then paying again for Android. The saving is real in both, and partial in both: navigation, permissions, notifications and store review still need attention on each platform.

Both are fast enough for the app you are describing

Performance is where these comparisons spend most of their words, and it is almost never your deciding factor. Both are more than fast enough for a list, a form, a chart, a camera, a map. If you are building a 3D game or a real time audio workstation, you are a rare case and you should be talking to a specialist about native code rather than reading this. For everything else, the framework is not what will make your app feel slow. Unoptimised images and a chatty backend will.

Both have the SDKs you need

You may have read that Flutter is missing the integrations a real business needs, and that someone will have to write a bridge to your payment provider. That was true years ago. It is not true now. Stripe, Firebase, RevenueCat and Sentry all publish official Flutter packages, the same way they publish React Native ones. If a vendor matters to your business, check their documentation for both before you take anyone's word for it, including mine.

Both can ship a fix without waiting for a store review

This one gets cited as a React Native advantage, and it is not. React Native has it built in through Expo, and Flutter has it through Shorebird. The difference is who provides it and what it costs, not whether you can do it. Either way, ask whoever builds your app how they push an urgent fix, because the answer tells you more about them than about the framework.

Both are run by companies that ship their own apps on them

Meta builds React Native and uses it in its own products. Google builds Flutter and uses it in its own products. Neither is a hobby project that might be abandoned next year, and if you are worried about betting on something that disappears, neither of these is the risk worth losing sleep over.

What actually differs

Two things. After stripping out everything above, this is genuinely what is left.

The language, which really means the hiring pool

React Native is JavaScript and TypeScript. Flutter is Dart.

That sounds like a technical detail and it is really a staffing decision. JavaScript is the language the web already runs on, so the people who build or maintain your website can plausibly work on your app too, and the pool of people you can hire from later is large. Dart is used mainly for Flutter, which makes it a separate hire from a smaller pool.

This matters most at the moment you least want to think about it: when the person who built your app is unavailable and you need someone else to pick it up. That is the scenario worth optimising for, because it happens to almost everyone eventually.

How the interface gets drawn

React Native uses the platform's own interface components, so your app inherits how iOS and Android each expect things to look and behave. Flutter draws every pixel itself, so your app looks the way you designed it, identically on both platforms and on old devices too.

Neither is better. They serve different priorities. If your app should feel native to the phone it is on, that argues for React Native. If your brand's look matters more to you than each platform's conventions, and you want absolute control over the result, that is a real and legitimate reason to pick Flutter. Design led products often should.

Why the choice is worth a little care

Switching later is a rewrite, not a migration. The two share no code, so moving means building the app again while the first one keeps running. That is not a reason to agonise for weeks, but it is a reason to spend an hour on it rather than five minutes.

My bias, stated plainly

I build React Native apps. You should read everything above with that in mind, and it is also why this page tells you what Flutter is better at and corrects two myths that happen to favour my side.

I chose React Native for my own products, not for clients. Wallety and Qurany are both React Native, both mine, both live on the App Store and Google Play. The reason was the hiring pool argument above, applied to myself: I already worked in TypeScript every day, and that made the app something I could maintain for years instead of a language I would have to keep warm on the side.

So which one

Pick the one your developer has actually shipped something in.

A developer who has taken an app through both store reviews in the "wrong" framework will beat one who has never shipped in the right one, and it is not close. Everything that goes wrong with a first app goes wrong in the parts these two have in common: store listings, review rejections, subscription edge cases, the first month of real users on devices nobody tested. Experience of that is worth more than the language it was gained in.

If you have no developer yet and no preference, React Native is the safer default, for the hiring reason and no other. If you have a designer with strong opinions and a brand that must look identical everywhere, look seriously at Flutter.

Getting a real answer for your app

Send a paragraph about what you want to build. Not a spec, a paragraph. You will get back what I would build first, what it would cost, and whether React Native is genuinely the right fit, which is occasionally no.

hello@orbitapps.net, or read more about working with me on React Native. If cost is the next question, I have written about what a React Native app costs to build.