Clients ask us to settle the Flutter-versus-native argument in the abstract. It cannot be settled in the abstract — but the decision is usually clear once you answer four questions honestly.
1. Is the app the product, or a channel to it?
If the app is the business — a consumer product competing on feel and polish — native is worth the extra cost. If it is a channel onto an existing business (ordering, booking, field data capture), Flutter is almost always the right economic call.
2. How much platform-specific capability do you need?
Heavy Bluetooth work, background location, camera pipelines, widgets, watch apps, deep OS integration — these all have Flutter plugins, and those plugins are where you will spend your debugging time. Native removes an entire category of problem.
3. What does your team look like afterwards?
If you will maintain this in-house, hire for what your team can actually staff. One Flutter developer maintaining both platforms is a materially different proposition to hiring separate iOS and Android engineers.
4. How fast do you need both platforms?
Flutter genuinely delivers both stores in roughly 60% of the time of two native builds. If time to market is the binding constraint, that is decisive.
Our rough split
In practice we recommend Flutter for perhaps 70% of business applications, and native for consumer products where interaction quality is the differentiator, or where deep platform integration is central. What we would not recommend is choosing based on what the last article you read said.