Flutter: if you want a pixel perfect version of your app that looks similar on Android and iOS. Some quite popular apps use it and make a shit ton of money, for example Headspace. More here: https://flutterhunt.com/

React Native: totally viable, because core business logic is the same. If you want native UI elements and all the iOS Liquid Glass stuff, but don’t want to have to completely separate code based, React Native is a viable option if you don’t mind installing lots of third party packages for functionality you get out of the box in Flutter or true native apps.

Native mobile: I have one smaller app with quite a custom calendar view, written with Claude Code natively for Android and iOS. Coding agents help and you get maximum control. Mentally, it’s a bit cumbersome to direct you agent to do everything twice. While one platform can serve as a reference implementation for the other, it’s kinda annoying mentally "to do the same feature all over again and test and direct the agent". But it’s doable.

KMP: No experience, I just hate most things around Android.

PWA: That ship has sailed. Nobody knows about PWAs, most PWAs are bad. It’s a bummer really.

Capacitor: make an SPA (offline-first preferably), and use native code plugins via Capacitor. Still quite feasible, comparable to Flutter in the sense that you need to build a custom UI or use a fake version of Liquid Glass and Material. I use Ionic for that, but it’s a bit dated (still on Material v2). Heavily depends on your skills as a web dev to get good UX.

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pjmlp 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

No one cares about PWAs, because mobile Web by itself is good enough without having to deal with PWAs boilerplate.

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sgt 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Native was always the best. It was just time consuming, requiring a bigger team. Now with AI helping out, it's probably the best option by far. I still like Flutter a lot though because you can get stuff done fairly quickly and even apply Material design to the iOS apps or vice versa if you want to (if it's a business app where the design doesn't matter too much). Or if you e.g. target win32

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gman83 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Even with AI, maintaining feature parity between Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, and Mac is extremely complex. Flutter makes it so much easier. If I were doing native, I'd probably have to drop all desktop platforms.

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victorbjorklund 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In most cases yes but if you don’t want native elements and you want your app to look exactly the same on android as on iOS then flutter is a better choice. Assuming you don’t have any performance limitiations.

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tcfhgj an hour ago | parent [-]

Why would you want apps on different os look exactly the same?

	▲	GeneralMaximus 25 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Why would you not? I use Ableton, Figma, and Emacs regularly. I have a decade (or more) of muscle memory around these apps. If they suddenly decided to adopt the look, feel, and conventions of their underlying host platform, I’d be very upset. If I’m using Emacs, I don’t want to use Cmd+S to save my files on macOS and Ctrl+S on Windows. I’ve already memorized C-x C-s. I don’t want Ableton to adopt whatever new design language Apple or Microsoft is chasing this week. I want to open the app and find the UI controls looking and behaving exactly the same as they’ve looked and behaved since I started using it in 2014. I want to write code, make music, do design. I don’t want to be frustrated because the button for enabling the metronome is 15px to the left on Windows vs. macOS. Apps that look and feel native only make sense in two cases: 1. The app is tied to the platform. E.g. Logic Pro. It can integrate deeply into macOS and use the native widget set because it will never run on any other platform. Same for Bear, Things, Pixelmator, Omni Group apps, etc. 2. The app is a replaceable, throw-away utility. I call these “fungible apps”. For example, it doesn’t really matter which Mastodon or Bluesky client you use. There are hundreds of them, and they’re not complex enough that the loss of familiarity or muscle memory matters very much. You can use one client on Windows, a different one on macOS, and a third one on Linux, and it’ll be fine. They can all be native to their platforms, or not. The interaction model is simple enough that you can afford to have a different one on every platform. For apps that really matter—the apps I use to put food on the table—I absolutely want them to look and feel exactly the same on every platform. The app is the OS, the actual OS is just a hardware abstraction layer. Can Flutter be used to build apps like Figma or Ableton or Emacs? I actually don’t think so. It’s a poor toolkit for building anything that must last for more than 3-5 years. If you care about longevity, there are basically only three options in 2026: Qt, Electron, or roll your own like Zed/Sublime.
	▲	sgt 41 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't think you'd want to in most cases, but adapting to different platforms takes energy and thought. For business CRUD apps you may just want to ignore that and get something out that works well.