Why I'm Not Betting My Business on Flutter

I get it. Flutter's marketing is solid. "Write once, run anywhere." Single codebase for iOS, Android, web. Sounds perfect until you're in production.

I spent 3 months integrating a Flutter app with an ERP system two years ago. Looked great in demos. Then we hit platform-specific issues: payment gateways behaved differently on iOS vs Android, native module compatibility was a nightmare, and performance on older devices made clients unhappy.

The real cost isn't learning Dart. It's the context switching. When something breaks on iOS, you're now writing native Swift. Android? Kotlin. Web? Different beast entirely. You've bought the illusion of code sharing while actually maintaining multiple platforms.

I've moved away from this approach. My recent projects use platform-native stacks where it matters (mobile) and share business logic through APIs instead.

For internal tools? Different story. I built a Telegram bot management dashboard in Vue 3 + Express. Single codebase. Works everywhere. But that's because web is the platform.

Flutter's strongest play is companies with unlimited mobile budgets and small product teams. That's not most of us.

What I see working: native mobile where you need it, web for everything else. Your core business logic lives in a solid API (I use Node.js/TypeScript). Clients connect however they need. iOS, Android, web, Telegram bots—doesn't matter. You maintain one thing.

Is Flutter better than it was? Probably. The performance improvements are real. But "better" doesn't mean "the right tool." I've learned that the hard way.

The frameworks that survive aren't the ones promising everything. They're the ones that solve one problem really well and get out of your way. That's why I keep coming back to boring stacks: TypeScript backends, Vue/React frontends, native mobile when needed.

Flutter will work for your next project. Just make sure you're not choosing it because the marketing feels good.