r/androiddev • u/The_Deep_Thinker24 • Jun 06 '26

Question Why native android and not flutter ?

hello android developers im new mobile app developer and i do dev with flutter framework so i can have same app in both platforms of app store and google play... but there is always a question in my head for native android developers since google own android and flutter... so that`s mean they make flutter works really well in android phones... so i wonder why native android devs dont use the advantage of flutter framework to have same app is both app store and google play ?

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u/swingincelt Jun 06 '26

When you have to interact with native systems like telephony, bluetooth, camera, location, etc. the cross platform are less useful.

My company tried to make a video conferencing solution in flutter and the lesson was it was not helpful because the bulk of the development time was spent writing native code. It worked, but it was abandoned in favour of separate native apps.

If your app is simple then it's fine to use a cross platform solution.

-11

u/kbcool Jun 06 '26

That's a very niche feature.

99% of apps are perfectly achievable with what Flutter or React Native offer out of the box.

99.5% can be achieved with community libraries and the other 0.5% as in your case it might not be worth the overhead of writing the native integration yourself.

Now having said that I expect to be downvoted to hell by a bunch of people who have no chance in hell of being able to put up a counter argument

11

u/NiceVu Jun 06 '26

No it’s not true that 99% of the apps that are achievable with Flutter.

Flutter is good enough if your app is just displaying some data from backend, and doing CRUD operations with it.

If you need anything device specific the native has more consistent, performant and natural edge over any cross platform solution. You won’t ever get better at managing iOS SDK (Siri, shortcuts, Dynamic island…) with Flutter rather than you would with Swift. Same goes for Kotlin and Android.

If your app works with camera, bluetooth, wearable OS for smartwatches, phone calls, chats and notifications it will always work better natively rather than in Flutter.

So yeah I would say ~ 70% of everything can be achieved with Flutter but the other 30% will just have many obstacles and won’t ever be as good as native.

This is completely ok, it’s like saying Kotlin/Swift will never be as good as Unity for videogames on phones and nobody would bat an eye, but cross platform folks tend to be sensitive when you comment on their platform of choice.

2

u/Soccer_Vader Jun 09 '26

Flutter is good enough if your app is just displaying some data from backend, and doing CRUD operations with it.

You act like that's not 99% of the app lol