Jake Shapley

It depends. If you only need it to run on Android, you might be able to develop it faster in Android Studio (Java/Kotlin) with your experience with Java. Kotlin syntax is different than Java, but Android Studio has conversion from Java to Kotlin built-in.

If you need apps for both iOS and Android, or you are willing to be pushed out of your comfort zone and build experience, definitely go with Flutter/Dart. I was able to translate my iOS and Android native skills to Flutter/Dart very quickly. Performance is as good or better than native, and much better than React Native. Development is actually faster than a single platform native app, as well.

I would definitely go with Flutter. I have been writing native apps in iOS (Objective-C/Swift) and Android (Java/Kotlin) for over 6 years. For public-facing apps, we have generally written and maintained 3 code bases (iOS, Android, Web), so we have tried cross-platform solutions, including Ionic and React Native. React Native was definitely better than Ionic, but still lagged significantly behind native, in terms of performance. Flutter is a game-changer. I have been tasked with writing a public-facing app to help users identify fish species. It is backed with AWS Amplify (AppSync/GraphQL). I was able to write a platform-aware UI, with native-looking elements in less time than it would have taken me to write it natively for a single platform. It looks like with just a few UI and backend tweaks, we will also be able to deploy it for Web. I haven't run tests to confirm, but performance appears to be at least as good as native. Here are some additional benefits when using Flutter/Dart with VSCode:

• easy to set up and start coding
• easy to integrate/manage dependencies
• hot reload across multiple devices, on save
• auto-formatting
• quick-fix suggestions for syntax, etc. errors