The Cross-Platform Gap Has Closed
Three years ago, the conventional wisdom was: build native (Swift/Kotlin) if performance and UX matter, build cross-platform (React Native/Flutter) if budget is tight. That calculus has changed. Flutter 3.x and React Native's new architecture have eliminated most of the performance gap for typical business apps, and the developer experience has matured significantly.
Today, the decision is less about performance and more about team expertise and long-term maintenance. React Native makes sense if your team already knows React — the JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem transfers directly, and the component model is familiar. Flutter makes sense if you want a single codebase that targets mobile, web, and desktop simultaneously, and you are willing to learn Dart (which most developers pick up quickly).
Native development (SwiftUI for iOS, Jetpack Compose for Android) still makes sense for: apps with deep OS integration (health data, ARKit, advanced camera features), apps that need to compete on UX with category leaders (banking, social media), or when you have the budget to maintain two separate codebases. At Trilab.Tech, we build cross-platform apps with Flutter or React Native by default and reserve native for cases where the product requirements genuinely demand it.