Having a mobile app is no longer just a competitive advantage. We’re at a point where companies know it well that they need one to capture a wider market and improve both user experience and the general quality of interactions with their audience.
For many companies, particularly in mobile-first industries, an app is the primary way to deliver value. As a CTO or tech decision-maker, it often falls on you to choose the right technology to build it. This decision is important as it sets the direction for your team and can have a lasting impact on development speed, performance, and the app’s ability to scale as your business grows.
This is where the big decisions come in: Do you build for one platform or both Android and iOS? Should you go for a cross-platform solution or stick with native development? Each option comes with its own set of pros and cons, and at first glance, they all might seem like the perfect fit. In this article, I’ll share my perspective on the most popular frameworks based on 12+ years of experience. I’ll make a comparison among React Native, Flutter, and Native iOS & Android to help you weigh the pros and cons of each.
Native development
The first, and arguably considered by many the least risky option, is to go with native SDKs. I’ll make a quick rundown of the upsides and downsides. Both iOS and Android provide native SDKs that let you build apps specifically for their platforms, ensuring access to the latest features and full utilization of device capabilities.
For Android, apps are written in Kotlin using the native UI framework called Jetpack Compose. On iOS, development is done in Swift, with Apple recently promoting SwiftUI as the go-to framework for building user interfaces.
The main downside of the native approach is that it requires developing two separate apps—one for Android and one for iOS—which means duplicating both the business logic and the UI. While this can result in highly optimized and feature-rich apps, it often increases development time and complexity.
UI
Both Jetpack Compose and SwiftUI provide the latest UI components, designed by Google and Apple respectively, and are built around the best practices recommended by the platform maintainers. These native UI kits offer a high level of customization, smooth animations, and are optimized for top-notch performance.
If you’re aiming for an app that feels fully integrated with the platform—like Gmail on Android or iMessage on iOS—native SDKs are the best choice. They allow you to leverage platform-specific components and UX patterns exactly as intended by Google and Apple, ensuring your app feels natural and part of the ecosystem. This approach guarantees that the user experience aligns perfectly with each platform's design philosophy.
Business logic
When going the native route, the business logic and integrations need to be built twice—once for each platform. While the core logic remains the same, engineers will often lean into slightly different architectures and paradigms tailored to the strengths of each platform. This duplication can be time-consuming, but it also presents a unique opportunity for cross-platform collaboration. I’ve seen teams where iOS and Android engineers work closely together, exchanging ideas and solving shared challenges, which often leads to overall stronger, more refined solutions.
Here’s a tip: One structure that works well is having one platform take the lead in terms of implementation. Since both platforms will be integrating with the same third-party services and APIs, it can be more efficient for one team to work through the complexities of those integrations first, while the other follows their lead. This approach helps avoid duplicated effort and ensures that both apps can benefit from shared solutions to common challenges.
Maintainability
Both Apple and Google provide solid tools for keeping your apps up to date with the latest operating systems and SDKs. In fact, in my work, I've had apps that hadn't been touched for 4-5 years, and updating them to the latest SDKs only took a few hours to a few days. It’s rare that major work is required for these updates—usually, it’s just a matter of bumping version numbers and replacing a few deprecated APIs.
Google tends to be a bit more developer-friendly, making Android apps slightly easier to upgrade, but both platforms offer a relatively low-risk path for keeping apps current compared to other frameworks. Native development gives you the confidence that maintaining compatibility with the latest OS releases won’t be a major headache.
Here's a quick look at the pros and cons of using native technologies:
The pros:
- native look and feel
- maintainability
- app size
The cons:
- adapting for non-mobile developers
- speed (development requires nearly twice the effort)
The bottom line: Native development offers the highest level of platform integration, providing apps with the best possible performance, user experience, and access to device features. However, it requires developing two separate codebases, which can significantly increase development time and complexity. While maintainability is relatively smooth with tools provided by Apple and Google, native development is most suitable for teams that prioritize performance and platform-specific user experiences over speed of delivery.
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ReactNative
React Native, originally developed by Meta (Facebook), is a framework that uses JavaScript and TypeScript for building mobile apps. Its main goal is to solve the problem of needing two separate apps for iOS and Android, streamlining the development process and speeding up delivery. The framework is often marketed as offering the best of both worlds—a native look and feel, while allowing you to build a single application for both platforms.
On paper, the value proposition sounds ideal. It promises to solve many of the challenges developers face when building for multiple platforms. However, in practice, the situation’s a bit more complex. While React Native can certainly help in reducing development time, there are trade-offs, particularly in areas like performance and the need for custom native modules, that aren't always obvious at first glance.
UI
The UI is where much of the complexity arises in cross-platform frameworks like React Native. React Native uses the same paradigm for creating UIs as the React framework does on the web. Under the hood, however, the components are rendered as native iOS and Android elements. This sounds great in theory, and for simple apps, it often works well. For example, buttons on both Android and iOS share common properties—they have text, a background, and a click action handler. Wrapping these elements in a shared component and rendering them appropriately for each platform seems logical and efficient.
But when you dig deeper, the differences between the platforms become more apparent. While a button might look similar on both platforms, things like rounded corners work differently on Android compared to iOS. Android supports shadows (referred to as "elevation") natively, while iOS does not. This leads to inconsistencies that can be difficult to reconcile, and buttons are just the beginning—date pickers and other more complex components vary even more between the two platforms.
React Native does offer some built-in support for handling these differences, but there are still many cases where the behavior cannot easily be matched.
You’re often left with two options:
- Write conditional logic to distinguish between platforms and create slightly different components for each, which undercuts the idea of “write once, use everywhere.”
- Use third-party libraries to bridge the gaps, which is what many engineers ultimately rely on (more on this in the maintainability section).
These trade-offs mean that while React Native can speed up initial development, you may encounter challenges as your app grows more complex.
Business logic
In React Native, the business logic is typically written once. The framework provides solid core libraries for handling common tasks like network requests, disk access, and database manipulation. For most use cases, this works smoothly across both iOS and Android.
However, there are situations where you might need to use a third-party service or protocol that isn’t natively supported by React Native. In such cases, you’ll need to build a bridge module, which acts as an adapter, connecting the native side (Kotlin for Android, Swift for iOS) to the React Native app. This allows you to integrate native functionality into your cross-platform application.
Building custom native bridge modules
While it’s possible to integrate native logic or views into a React Native app, creating a bridge module requires serializing and deserializing objects between JavaScript and the native side. This process can be quite complex and demands a deep understanding of both React Native and native languages like Kotlin or Swift to do it properly.
It also involves writing a fair bit of boilerplate code, which can be cumbersome. This isn’t something you’ll want to do frequently, as maintaining custom modules can become a headache when React Native updates its APIs or when iOS or Android introduce platform changes.
Ultimately, while React Native simplifies much of the business logic integration across platforms, there are edge cases where native code is unavoidable, and that can introduce additional complexity to your development process.
Maintainability
In my experience, maintainability is where React Native tends to fall short. React Native is known for releasing frequent updates, sometimes introducing breaking changes. I’ve seen several cases where a React Native update has forced developers to spend weeks, or even months, fixing their app to get it back to a stable state.
One of the key reasons for this, in my view, is the reliance on third-party libraries. React Native apps often depend on at least twice more third-party libraries compared to native apps, as these libraries help developers avoid dealing with platform-specific behaviors between iOS and Android. When React Native releases a new version, those libraries also need to be updated. If they aren’t properly maintained or become obsolete, you may be forced to replace them, adding significant risk and effort to your project.
Here's a quick look at the pros and cons of using React Native:
The pros:
- native look and feel (even though it comes with its caveats)
- adapting for non-mobile developers (it’s easier for React developers to pick up React Native compared to learning Kotlin/Swift)
- speed
The cons:
- maintainability (hard to maintain, high risks updates-wise)
- app size (due to additional libraries)
The bottom line: React Native can offer speed and flexibility at the start, but when it comes to long-term maintenance, especially as your app grows in complexity, the frequent breaking changes and reliance on external libraries can introduce significant challenges.
Flutter
Flutter is a cross-platform framework developed by Google, with applications written in Dart. Like React Native, it aims to solve the problem of building apps for multiple platforms without having to create two separate codebases. However, Flutter takes a completely different approach, which comes with its own set of pros and cons.
While React Native uses a bridge to render native components, Flutter opts for a different strategy—it renders everything from scratch using its own engine. This allows for more consistent behavior across iOS and Android, as the UI and the logic are the same on both platforms. This approach reduces the dependency on native components, which can lead to fewer surprises when it comes to differences between platforms.
UI
Flutter takes a unique approach to UI rendering by using the mobile operating system solely for drawing and receiving user input. Unlike React Native, Flutter doesn't rely on native components. Instead, it asks the OS for a canvas to draw on and handles everything else within the framework itself. Flutter introduces its own concepts for buttons, widgets, text views, and lists, all rendered by the Impeller rendering engine, which is known for its performance.
The major advantage of this approach is that you don’t need to worry about differences in behavior between iOS and Android, as everything is controlled within the Flutter ecosystem. This makes updating to new OS versions much smoother and significantly reduces the need for custom platform-specific code. You rarely have to write logic that distinguishes between iOS and Android, allowing for faster development and easier maintenance.
Business logic
In Flutter, the business logic is written just once. Generally, Dart provides strong core libraries for tasks like network requests, disk access, and database manipulation. However, there may be cases where you need to use a third-party service or protocol that doesn’t have Dart support. In such situations, you can create a bridge module on the native side (in Kotlin for Android or Swift for iOS) to integrate that functionality back into your Flutter app.
Building custom native bridge modules requires additional effort but allows you to extend Flutter’s capabilities when necessary, ensuring that your app can still leverage native platform features when Dart alone isn't sufficient.
Maintainability
In my experience over the past five years of actively using Flutter, updating versions is very similar to the experience of updating native apps. Most updates happen automatically, and you rarely need to make significant changes. Typically, you can update a Flutter app to the latest version in a matter of hours to a few days. This, along with the fact that you don’t need to write conditional logic for platform-specific behavior in the UI, is where Flutter truly stands out compared to other cross-platform frameworks. It simplifies maintenance while ensuring consistency across platforms.
Here’s a quick pros and cons breakdown for Flutter:
The pros:
- consistency across platforms (less reliance on native components)
- customizability (more control over UI and animations)
- speed of development (faster in building and maintaining the UI across platforms)
The cons:
- ecosystem maturity (still growing, may lack certain third-party libraries)
- app size (heavier due to bundled UI engine)
The bottom line: Flutter excels at delivering a consistent UI and performance across platforms, making it a strong choice for apps that require polished, custom designs and smooth animations. Its lack of reliance on native components eliminates many platform-specific quirks, speeding up development and reducing the need for conditional code. However, this approach can lead to larger app sizes and, while the Flutter ecosystem is rapidly growing, it still lacks the maturity and breadth of tools available in native development or React Native. Flutter is ideal for teams prioritizing consistency and customization, but be mindful of the trade-offs in app size and third-party support.
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