React Native vs. Ionic vs. Flutter vs something else for mobile app development

Personally I think Flutter beats the shite out of everything else for mobile apps. Web support is kinda sorta there, as in it mostly works, but some packages don't yet support web and performance can be trash at times. It is improving, though.

I tried NativeScript for a while, which I believe works like React Native, Ionic, Meteor, etc. in that it's javascript/html/css and there's a translation layer or something. I spent a ton of time trying to get decent performance out of it (with a pretty standard list->details style app, though admittedly there's a bit of processing involved).

I started over with Flutter and was blown away. Flutter has its own rendering engine so there's no translation. Also, layout and styling is much simpler as it's just nested "widgets" all the way down, and widgets have properties for styling so you're not dicking around with css. Seriously, everything is a "widget". Want a column of cards? Use a Column() widget and put your array of Card() widgets in the Column's children property. Want some padding around that column? Wrap it with Padding() and the Column() is now the child property of Padding() (VS Code makes this very easy). It is extremely fast and easy to build a good looking app with it.

The weakness of Flutter is web support as I mentioned, and it's also due to the rendering engine. I think it builds all your code and the rendering engine into one monolithic javascript app. Instead of using native html elements, everything is rendered with the engine so it doesn't feel quite like a real page. For a chat type app though, that might not be a bad thing.


My suggestion is to spend a day or two with Ionic or whatever, and then spend a day or two with Flutter building the same app. See which one gets you further, which performs the best, and which is more comfortable. My money is on Flutter on all three points.