Both React Native and Flutter ship one codebase to iOS and Android with near-native performance. The honest answer to "which is better" is: it depends on your team and your timeline. Here's how to decide fast.
Language & hiring
- React Native uses TypeScript/JavaScript — the same language as your web team. If you already write React, you're productive on day one, and hiring is easy.
- Flutter uses Dart — excellent, but a language your team probably doesn't know yet.
Ecosystem
React Native rides the entire npm ecosystem plus Expo's managed native modules. Flutter has a strong, curated package set (pub.dev). Both are mature; React Native's overlap with web tooling is the tiebreaker for most product teams.
Time to ship
This is where a head start matters most. With React Native + Expo, you can begin from a finished React Native template, so the theme, navigation and screens already exist. That's often the difference between shipping in a weekend and shipping in a month.
Our take
If your team writes React/TypeScript and you want the shortest path to a shipped app, choose React Native (Expo). If you have Dart expertise or need very custom rendering, Flutter is a fine choice.
Going with React Native? Skip the scaffolding — start from a production-ready Expo app template and spend your time on the parts that make your app *yours*.