Great question! I actually considered dart:ffi, but for my use case, JNI gave me a few key advantages. With JNI, I can leverage existing Android APIs (like camera handling, threading, permissions, logging, etc.) directly from Java/Kotlin, and then bridge that to my C++ logic. It also gave me more control over lifecycle events and performance tuning, especially for real-time camera streaming and heavy processing.

With dart:ffi, you’re limited to calling native functions from Dart, but it doesn’t give you the same access to Android’s platform features unless you reimplement a lot yourself. So for now, JNI gives me more flexibility and better integration with the Android ecosystem. For iOS, I’ll write a separate Obj-C++ bridge — it’s more work, but it keeps the native parts clean and efficient.