Long live cross-platform solutions! They’re doing such a good job these days that it’s getting harder and harder to justify going for native. Does this mean that native app development is dead and cross-platform is the way to go from now on?
I’ve been doing cross-platform development with Flutter for over 5 years and recently got the question of why someone would even go for a native solution these days. It was a good starter because I didn’t have a clear answer to start with either. Years ago I would always tell people: if your app is simple enough, go with Flutter, if things are more complex: go safe with native.
I was tempted to answer the same way when I got this question again, but I figured it was a much finer line between native versus cross-platform than years ago. A framework like Flutter or React-Native has become so crazy good, when would I choose native over cross-platform? 3 points to get your mind going.
Legacy projects
Let’s start with the obvious: you already have native Android and iOS projects. It would be an expensive job to rewrite (part of) your application in a cross-platform solution. You could vouch for writing new features in a cross-platform solution and add it to the existing app. Flutter, React Native, and Compose Multiplatform all have workable solutions for adding to an…
