Flutter or native: how we actually decide

If the app is mostly screens, lists and forms talking to an API, Flutter ships one codebase to two stores without a visible compromise. If it lives in the camera, the sensors, background audio or the watch, native gets there faster and stays there when the OS changes.

Widgets, Live Activities, App Clips, HealthKit, Screen Time — each one is a week of bridging in Flutter and an afternoon in Swift. Two or three of them on the roadmap and the cross-platform saving is gone.

A team that already writes Kotlin and Swift will resent a Dart codebase; a small team with one mobile engineer will thank you for it. We ask about the hire you plan to make, not the one you have.

Cross-platform usually saves 30–40% on the first version. It saves less on the third, when the platform features arrive. We price both paths honestly and show where the lines cross.