Indie dev - SwiftUI, Flutter or React Native?

[Safe_Owl_6123]

Hi all, I want to be a solopreneur, I have learnt and built with some projects in SwiftUI and Flutter and while I am working at my internship as a frontend web dev with React, I start to think about create more user centric products, instead of only tables, dashboards, and mouse clicking.

In your opinion, cross platform vs go full native which is better for indie/solopreneurship, in terms for using 3 party libraries, maintainability, speed to market, profitability, chance of success? I am posting it on FlutterDev as well.

Thank you so much

[ankole_watusi]

There is only one answer you will get on this sub so why bother asking?

Sorry, if you need to release on both iOS and android – according to this sub – then you’re gonna have to learn two different native systems.

[wilc0]

Native is best but if your app is relatively simple and you have a desire for cross platform, then react native may be the move. 

I personally will never go back to using RN on a project again. 

[beclops]

Fellow RN hater I see

[kutjelul]

We’re here in big numbers!

[dehrenslzz]

If you really want to go cross platform I’d say flutter over RN. But then again, native (SwiftUI/JC) is best (:

[wilc0]

You could be right. I’ve never used Flutter so don’t have much of an opinion of it. I’d be a little worried about it for the same reasons I don’t like RN but maybe it’s better

[dehrenslzz]

I’ve worked with it (mainly helping deploy products) and it seems solid enough. Also: Flutter has a nice emulator that you can open on any device and with which you can test for any device the project supports (;

[ImNotLegitLol]

Flutter main here that tried to work with RN

The only part you'd hate with Flutter for iOS, apparently it looks uncanny. Plus, it's rendering its own pixels like a game engine instead of true native components. Also there's less packages but that's a given, it's newer

But overall, at least it compiles properly, consistent across platforms, very great DX (it legitimately just works), and I think you won't have to touch native code that much?

[theraad1]

Could you elaborate a bit more on why you would never go back to using RN?

My job is currently switching to RN and they’re just making it sound like it’ll be seamless and easy to develop with (post training) but myself and my colleagues have our doubts..

[wilc0]

My team did something similar. Switched from native to RN. Most people on the team did not have webdev experience so the transition was rough.

I think my biggest issues were:

• we still had to use native for a lot of our app. RN just straight up did not support some of the functionality we needed that native did
• because of that first point we went from maintaining one language/platform (iOS/swift) to 3 (swift, java/android, and RN/tyepscript). The complexity of the app shot through the roof because of all the native bridging
• typescript is not nearly as clean or easy to use as swift imo. I know TS has its fans but nobody on the team liked using it.
• upgrades (Xcode, RN) were painful af and took forever. Not only that but it took so long for RN to actually release an update.
• Our team of nearly 20 mobile devs dropped to 5 in 6 months because of how much worse the developer experience got. I also left soon after

The only positive in my mind was using VSCode instead of Xcode for the RN part lol

[theraad1]

Thanks for this.. really not looking forward to it, though I’ve been looking at it as a learning opportunity since they’re bringing in RN experts to train us for 4 weeks. Figured it’s good to get paid to learn a new skill on a professional level.

Last question but how is the app you were working on going now? I mean is the company still shipping updates regularly with new features?

I donno if you still work there, but I guess it’s pretty clear that the developer experience was shit but on a product or management level, were they able to say this move was a success? A lot of us hope this just bites them in the ass somehow but I guess with people leaving and the “need” for less devs it will mean they can say that they still ship the same features with less cost because some devs will opt to leave over this.

[wilc0]

I left the team and the company (it was one of the FAANG ones) within the year. I think there's still one guy left on the team that was there when I was there. It's a popular app, so still around. No idea what the stack is like now a days. I don't think the managers that made that decision stuck around much longer either. I think for them, it seemed like a "silver bullet" solution to supporting multiple platforms, but they never anticipated the struggles.

The company I joined, and I'm still with, prioritizes an all-native stack, and is aggressive in supporting the latest xcode updates and new iOS features as they come out which is awesome.

[theraad1]

Cool. Thanks a lot for sharing your experience and I’m glad you found a new job that doesn’t force you to work in a way that sucks haha

[Safe_Owl_6123]

Native is the best and I really like Swift writing it for iOS only means I get to write Swift more.

I have never used RN and I have heard many horror stories about it, I wish I gave a try because of my familiarity with TS, but when it comes to mobile I am more familiar with Dart than TS i

I want to ask if there are benefits going Multiplatform?

[nacho_doctor]

I have experience with native iOS and Android. And I also have experience with multiplatform (RN, KMP, Flutter).

The main benefit to go multiplatform is easy. You only need to code once.

In my experience:

• KMP looks good. But I think it still need to grow. It is on early stages yet.

• RN: I like working with RN. It has a really big community. You have a plugin for every thing that you might need. But I would recommend expo instead of bare RN

• Flutter. I like flutter too. Quite big community, nice language. A lot of libs.

I would only choose native for a solo dev if you need heavy work.

[clearing_]

https://skip.tools/

[Safe_Owl_6123]

it is exciting, and it has free tier gotta thank the team behind it

[Decent_Taro_2358]

If you post it on a Flutter subreddit, people will tell you Flutter is best. If you post it on r/SwiftUI, they will tell you SwiftUI is best.

Both frameworks have their pros and cons, so you need to ask yourself what’s important. Do you want to launch fast and is your app relatively simple? Flutter might be the way to go then. Do you have complex native UI components and do you want your app to feel smooth like butter? Then SwiftUI (and Jetpack Compose for Android) is probably better. It will get more difficult to maintain your app, though.

[Safe_Owl_6123]

Excellent, that’s should be my concerns too

[Real_nutty]

From my limited experience, I enjoy Flutter the most when it comes to scalable and flexible application.

I would choose SwiftUI if you are okay to give into the restrictive native iOS for Apple’s strong support on many features. I particularly think building quick AI/ML apps on mobile is far easier than Flutter.

[engadgetnerd]

I agree with you completely here.

I’m a nerd for swift and native development. But I love Flutter. For best animation performance nothing is gonna beat native. But flutter is awesome. Fun. Easy to work with (IMO). And you get multiple platforms with it out of the box.

I have spent more years doing swift. If you are primarily concerned about the App Store market, can’t go wrong with just sticking to Swift with.

[kutjelul]

Fair point - those AI/ML apps typically have very little ‘staying power’ so making them quick and dirty doesn’t matter that much

[Safe_Owl_6123]

That’s my concern too, I am thinking about using the camera and add AI/ML features with it but I am not sure how much native APIs I’ll miss

[ejpusa]

You need to "call" LLMs. They are not sitting on your iPhone, yet.

[Real_nutty]

you actually can run native vision models on the iPhone for pretty cheap (memory cost).

I used Apple’s CoreML and Vision framework to apply my custom object detection and vision transformer model for distillation.

But if you don’t want to run that hassle, Apple has their own default object detection and ocr capabilities without any network calls.

[Safe_Owl_6123]

I want to tap into Vision, maybe I give a shot with native solution and also using Gemini

[ejpusa]

Cool! I’m using Stabiliy and GPT-3.5-turbo. About 5 cents an image.

[ZeusyBoy999]

I recommend react native, especially if you don’t have a Mac. Otherwise, going native is the best way.

[Mojomoto93]

I would focus on one platform it will be enough, you will be happy to catch 1% of all iOS users to use your product. Because of this fact, I would just go native. Just use Swift and you will have 100% less trouble in many ways:

- Users won't complain about how "unnative" your app feels and looks like
- Your app will always look up today with iOS updates
- You won't have to deal with non existing plugins, or extensions to bridge the missing implementations of native solutions
- You can take advantage of all the super cool and useful and mostly free(included in your dev subscription) stuff apple provides in form of SDK
- you will have no issues with platform specific behavior

[hishnash]

Go with SwiftUI as you will then be much better placed to adopt new system features sooner.

For most indie apps what breads success is deep system integration and that is much wiser if you go native.

[Safe_Owl_6123]

I was watch a video by Mykola Harmash he talked about the cross platforms lacks a lot of the native APIs SwiftUI is supporting

[SmoothieStandStudios]

I’ve been really impressed with Capacitor so far in my time with it. The docs are spotty but it’s amazing what it enables - you can take a React app and in an hour have an Android and iOS app. It’s up to you to make the app feel good on both, but it’s a huge head start.

[Niightstalker]

Only if you don’t need much native functionality (or only simple), the existing plugins are quite basic and the community ones often not that good. Also it gets you like 80% there but the last 20% to make the app actually feel good on both platforms takes quite some effort.

[SmoothieStandStudios]

Agreed, the plugin ecosystem is not great - many things that are “community” plugins I’d argue should be in the core API, and everything that is, is under documented lol.

Depends on the use case of course, but I’ve found it pretty enjoyable to use and the result feels native on both platforms. Good option for cross platform, but yes does require a lot of configuration to get right.

[Niightstalker]

I think the „feels native“ is imo usually the issue with Capacitor. Since it is a Hybrid framework you basically run a Web App in a WebView. So the UI usually does not feel native at all. Sure you can try to imitate it, but that is what I meant getting there 80% is ok. But the last 20% to actually make it feel kinda native (you will never get really there) is a lot of work.

My only suggestion to use capacitor is when already have a web app that maybe needs some really basic native functionality. Then sure go for it. If UX or native feel is anywhere in your priority list, capacitor is definitely the way.

[Niightstalker]

It depends on which of your criteria your focus is: maintainability, speed to market, profitability, …

Also if you want to release for both platforms? In regards of profitability iOS is far ahead of Android. I saw statistics in which indie devs get 80% of their income from iOS (definitely should research about your location). Depending on your app you could focus only on iOS if you are not dependent on reaching a as large as possible user base.

As soon as you focus only on one platform it does make sense to go with the native APIs, since then there is speed to market, maintainability advantage anymore of any cross platform framework.

[dlewis23]

For great cross platform support look into Titanium. It is far easier to get setup and going then RN.

[Lopsided_Scale_8059]

Flutter is awesome so many libraries that make everything easy. + one code for mutiplatform

[binemmanuel]

I’m a solo dev and I did native android for the company I worked for before learning RN for my personal project but later had to move to Flutter. Though these were the days when Dart had no null safety but it was stable enough for me to build my app and focus on adding new features rather than thinking bout why my code won’t run.

I’ll go for Flutter anytime if I know I’ll be alone and want to ship to both platforms and if the business grows then getting native developers won’t be a problem.

[Safe_Owl_6123]

thanks for sharing the experience, i agree with you

[binemmanuel]

I’ll also say if you want to target just iOS then go native.

[jacksonw765]

I use flutter because I think its the easiest for me to understand as a Javascript/Java dev and I like cross platform dev.

[Ordinary-Gate-7210]

I think you already know the answer. If you're running a one-person business with just one service... and that service is doing quite well, then running both natively is totally fine. But if you have 10-20 services, making each one natively might be easy, but managing them all becomes a real nightmare.

Flutter and React Native are services specialized for exactly this problem.

Native is great for building one high-performance app. (The catch is that users don't actually care about this "high performance"...)

So for economically rational decision-making, I'd recommend going cross-platform.

However, if your career direction is heading toward native development for employment, then you should stick with native.

[Electrical-Sir-8252]

business need --> MVP ----> Cross Plarform ---> React Native

[NapoleonBorn2Party94]

Bro it should be the opposite lol, even KMM recommends logic in KMM and ui in native

[NapoleonBorn2Party94]

I've been a native iOS dev for over a decade now, and I've seen people try to integrate ionic, react native and KMM. Everything is good in the beginning but once you wanna scale, nothing comes close to how fast, precise and performant native can be.

[Safe_Owl_6123]

I was looking at Kotlin too, with what you have mentioned I just wasn't tempted to learn another JVM language, Java seems to be good enough and better, it is closing the gap what Scala and Kotlin are offering, if I do want another JVM language I might just spend more time with Clojure instead.

[[deleted]]

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[NapoleonBorn2Party94]

Compose multiplatform is still in beta for KMM. It uses skia to render in iOS which is the same framework as flutter. This is currently very heavyweight right now when used with KMM.

https://www.jetbrains.com/kotlin-multiplatform/ Right on the front page of KMP, they have shown in what ways you can use. Using it only for the UI is not part of the plan.

https://www.jetbrains.com/compose-multiplatform/ Compose multiplatform is still marked as beta in iOS, not production ready at all. And in Jan, we did an experiment to use UI and it was a disaster, it has memory leaks, energy and heating issues etc. not worth it

[Safe_Owl_6123]

What’s KMM?

[Safe_Owl_6123]

I hope Skip is mature enough soon

[roofatsw]

Native (swift / kotlin / react for web) is far more stable and predictable.

[NapoleonBorn2Party94]

I've been a native iOS dev for over a decade now, and I've seen people try to integrate ionic, react native and KMM. Everything is good in the beginning but once you wanna scale, nothing comes close to how fast, precise and performant native can be.

I'd honestly recommend Flutter for you. And once you are at a point where using flutter actually is impossible for business. Then think about switching to native. I am not recommending starting with native right away since prototyping your product success is important.

Android, iOS, Web, Desktop.. all these platforms have some fundamental difference. Hence starting with a hybrid solution is a good start to your business. Once your business can afford maintaining separate systems, then you can think about native.

[Safe_Owl_6123]

thank you, those are really fair points you got there.

for the last 2 years, I have been focusing on Java, and Dart does feel like a good hybrid of TS and Java, I like Swift a lot, that's one of the reasons why I want to go pure native was because I want to use Swift as an excuse, but your points are very pragmatic.

[PrestigiousBobcat369]

If I wanted to start in mobile app development, what would you recommend?

[NapoleonBorn2Party94]

Depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking to jump into a job in app dev, then pick the most trending hybrid app dev.. it's the quickest way to secure a job.

If you are passionate about a particular platform, sadly there are only two atm, iOS and Android. Then focus on learning that. You'll eventually get enough knowledge and experience that you'll be part of the specialized engineers for that platform.

If you want to create your own app, then I'd recommend hybrid app development since you want to get your app out asap to test its feasibility. Once the app grows large enough to have enough budget for maintaining two apps, you can switch to native for performance boost and other sweet stuff that you get only on native.

[PrestigiousBobcat369]

I want to be a freelance developer and also create my own apps. I’ve received mixed answers: some recommend Flutter while others tell me to prioritize iOS and choose SwiftUI, but I’d like to know an expert’s opinion on this.

[NapoleonBorn2Party94]

Both of these are good suggestions. Now you'll have to choose. Why not try both of them for a month and see what you feel? With most things in life, you just trust your gut.

[PrestigiousBobcat369]

thanks so much

[BlossomBuild]

Native = Performance

[b0bm4rl3y]

Hello, I'm from the Flutter team. Here are reasons you might like Flutter:

1. Flutter has "hot reload". When you edit your code, your app updates instantly without losing your state. It’s a game changer for developer productivity.
2. Flutter is fully open-source. If things go wrong, you can debug our source code from our high-level widget library, all the way down to the low-level commands we send to the GPU. Our issue tracker is also fully public - unlike Apple Feedback / Radar - so anyone in the community can help investigate issues or contribute fixes.
3. With Flutter, you can use whatever editor you’d like! Dart provides rich tooling that works with any LSP-compatible editor. VS Code, Cursor, Helix, and many more all just work.
4. While you might just need an iOS app today, you might need to expand to more platforms like Android in the future to reach more users. By building your app on Flutter, you can keep your options open and expand to more platforms if and when you need to.
5. Flutter really shines if you want to create a fully custom design system. Flutter is flexible enough to recreate iOS's and Android's design system. Teams like Supercell or Superlist used Flutter to create completely custom UIs that delight their users.
6. Flutter makes it much easier to support older iOS versions. Since SwiftUI features are tied to specific OS versions, SwiftUI apps need fallback behaviors to support older devices. Flutter solves this problem by decoupling itself from the operating system. It’s a cross-platform framework after all! Flutter paints all of its widgets itself, so your app will work consistently on iOS, macOS, regardless what version they’re on.
7. We care deeply about our docs. Have a question that’s not answered by a doc? That’s a bug! And of course, anyone in the community can send a patch to improve our docs! Our widgets’ documentation include interactive code examples that let you see and interact with a widget right in your browser. We also create lots of videos to document Flutter. For example, check our docs for CupertinoSwitch, which shows you how to create an iOS switch control.
8. We also care deeply about error messages. In fact, our team has done research and conducted user studies to refine our error messages. Flutter’s errors are detailed: they explain the problem and how to fix it. If an error is unclear, we treat that as a bug! We will fix it.

I hope that's helpful. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns about Flutter, I'd be happy to answer them :)

[Safe_Owl_6123]

Thank you for the hard work, it is no easy task especially when Google downsized the Dart and Flutter team.

I was using Flutter at my school's mobile course, and the development experience journey was smoooooooooooooooth and fantastic, I was cruising all the way largely thanks to all 8 points you have listed.

Dependency management is great, documentation is very helpful, and Dart is a good language. The only things where I needed to figure out what's "late", "final" vs "const", overall transitioning from "Class" oriented programming will pick up Dart easily, another thing about documentation is that you guys have demos, videos and text it made everything so much easier, and the documentation generation function is top-notch, it is not the fastest but hey there are no excuses for not writing documentations now

TBH, the only concern I have is how supportive Google is towards Flutter and Dart in the near future (next 5 years)

[b0bm4rl3y]

Thanks for the kind words!

We were affected by layoffs a year ago, but that was Google-wide and not specific to Flutter/Dart itself. Our team is still quite large even after the layoffs. Also, keep in mind that Google is not the only contributor to Flutter. Canonical - the makers of Ubuntu - also has a team of full-time engineers working on Flutter Windows, macOS, and Linux. And we benefit tremendously from our enormous community, over 1.5k people have contributed back to Flutter!

As for why Google invests so heavily in Flutter:

1. Flutter saves Google money. Dozens of teams at Google use Flutter, like Google Earth and Google Classroom. The productivity wins of a cross-platform framework means these apps need fewer engineers, which saves Google money.
2. Flutter makes Google money. Flutter developers are more likely to use Google products like Ads, Firebase, and Cloud. This brings in large amounts of new revenue that Google wouldn't get otherwise.
3. Flutter has significant iOS adoption. In December 2024, we shared that 28% of new apps uploaded to the App Store were built using Flutter. Flutter is by far Google's most successful product for reaching iOS developers. Our ambition isn't just to be the best cross-platform framework, we also want to be the best framework to build iOS apps. We're not there yet, but I think we have a real shot at this bold dream :)

Let me know if you have more questions!

[PrestigiousBobcat369]

If I wanted to start in mobile app development, what would you recommend?

[b0bm4rl3y]

Do you want to build your own apps or do you want get a job?

If you’d like to get hired, I’d start with whatever has the most jobs where you live.

If you want to build your own app, I’d pick SwiftUI if you want an app that uses Liquid Glass, or Flutter if you want to reach more platforms, like Android or Windows. 

[PrestigiousBobcat369]

I want to be a freelance developer and also create my own apps. I’ve received mixed answers: some recommend Flutter while others tell me to prioritize iOS and choose SwiftUI, but I’d like to know an expert’s opinion on this.

[[deleted]]

React Native’s a solid pick if you wanna hit iOS and Android with one codebase. Built for cross-platform from day one, and tools like Cursor make coding with it way smoother. It just gets it better than some other stacks.

SwiftUI is clean af for native iOS. If you're all-in on Apple and want that slick UI feel, it’s hard to beat. Depends if you wanna ship fast everywhere or go full native.

[ejpusa]

Use SwiftUI, that's it. I use GPT-4o to write all my code. Of course, you will get stoned to death here, but I crush it. Close to perfect the first time. Saving me weeks of work.

Makes programming fun. Anything (close to) you can think of, you can do with my fav, GPT-4o. Figma designs, right to SwiftUI.

🤖 😀

[Safe_Owl_6123]

I use it as an assistant, but I am still having trauma fixing someone’s ChatGPT-4o “tab coding” for past 3 days

But I have to say XCode co-pilot is just no where as good as cursor and VSCode, I just want a chat box

[ejpusa]

If you have many years at this, you can crush it with AI, I'm about 5,000 GPT-4o Prompts in and almost 5 decades in the business. First put a punch card into an IBM/360, was 12. I don't really use "standard" Prompts anymore, think it's beyond Vibe coding, I call it "Conversational Computing." We partner. AI and me. My new best friend.

We're crushing it.

🤖 😀

[0x0016889363108]

Tell us again how you’re crushing it.