When clients ask us why we use Flutter, they expect the standard answer: one codebase, two platforms. That's true, but it's not the real reason.
The real reason is velocity
Building a product is a race against runway, market timing, and user patience. Flutter lets us ship production-ready features in half the time of native development — without the quality tradeoffs that other cross-platform tools force you into.
What Flutter gets right
1. Truly native performance
Flutter compiles to native ARM code. There's no JavaScript bridge, no virtual DOM, no runtime interpretation. The UI runs at 60fps (or 120fps on capable devices) because it's rendered directly by Skia — the same graphics engine Chrome uses.
2. One codebase, but not "write once, run anywhere"
We don't pretend iOS and Android are the same. Flutter gives us platform-adaptive widgets, so we can respect platform conventions (Material on Android, Cupertino on iOS) while sharing 95%+ of the business logic.
3. Developer experience
Hot reload changes the way you build UI. Instead of the compile-deploy-navigate cycle that native development demands, Flutter developers see changes in under a second. This compounds over thousands of iterations during a project.
When we don't use Flutter
We're honest about Flutter's limitations:
- Heavy native SDK integration (AR, complex camera pipelines) — sometimes native is the right call
- Existing native codebases — we won't rewrite a working app just to use Flutter
- Web-only projects — Next.js or similar is often a better fit for content-heavy web apps
The bottom line
Flutter isn't a silver bullet. It's a force multiplier for teams that know how to use it. After 6+ years and 30+ shipped products, we know how to use it.