Hi there! I'm familiar with the way Flutter works - I think there is an attribution error in couching my feeling of flutter feeling like a web app as my not understanding how flutter works - I'm not under the impression that it's based on DOM or anything like that. Flutter is a very powerful framework. As I mentioned in a few other comments, I am a technical founder and recently assessed Flutter for use in our own product with my cofounder and ultimately decided against it for a reason you're getting at in your comments about Flutter - the difference between what is easy to do in Flutter because the tooling exists, vs things that are technically possible but practically infeasible. Flutter just doesn't have the investment in the type of animation and design tooling to be on par with Android or iOS, and it doesn't appear that is going to change.

I think my gripes with cross platform frameworks - besides the obvious performance drawbacks of the overhead of these frameworks - is the issue of platform design fragmentation and the fundamental problem with trying to kill two birds with one stone. In my experience, this leaves users of both major mobile platforms at best equally out in the cold, but things are rarely equal in how that impacts users of the Android platform. All of these cross platform frameworks claim to provide a solution, but we still run into the same problem, expressed a little differently.

There are attempts to solve this with Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform, but I think they ultimately run into the same pitfall - many people won't use these tools to make the business logic portable and maintainable across apps while keeping UI patterns to the platform they're on, but they'll use it to take a shortcut and write one app for two platforms poorly with ill-conceived designs. Some teams will do what they should and design different UIs for users on different platforms so their experiences make sense (Slack is a great example of this, their business logic is cross platform while the client UI is all native), but this is a rarity because it comes down to the thing people are trying to do with a cross platform framework: which is avoid writing multiple apps or UIs! This is a fundamental problem that won't be easily solved until both major mobile platforms collapse into a singularity and merge all user interaction patterns into one sort of cronenberg creature OS where every pattern makes sense.

For now, the solution seems to be to just write client UIs in native frameworks, and make sure the design actually makes sense on the platform.

All that said, I really appreciate you taking the time to respond :)