Question

"They say Flutter is better as it's multi-platform. May I know what's your say on that?"

Answer

Alex Chiou

As my mom would always tell me, "There is no free lunch." In the end, Android and iOS are very different platforms with very specific mechanics. The cross-platform framework has to wrap that in some way; it doesn't magically go away. It can handle basic to medium difficulty use cases just fine, but when you're dealing with deep mobile integrations like frame drops when implementing a native camera capture, they fall behind, either suffering from bad performance or just lack of ability.

This is why frankly most apps I have seen built with cross-platform frameworks like PhoneGap, Flutter, React Native, etc aren't very good. Of course, there's a decent upper bound that you can achieve with them and there's some startups in particular that have done that, but when you get to 10 million+ users, you have to go native as your use-cases become too complex and performance becomes important.

To really illustrate this, Facebook created React Native. For the most part, Facebook as a company is actually moving away from React Native; it will only use it for products it has to ship and iterate on lightning fast. Instagram has actually deprecated React Native; its goal is to delete all instances of it and all new React Native code is banned. When I joined IG, we ripped out several React Native pages and rewrote them in native code to huge performance gains. Moving off of cross-platform made Instagram literally hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is why the vast majority of top mobile product companies, at least in Silicon Valley, are native instead of cross-platform.