Every founder building a mobile app eventually hits this question: do we ship one Flutter codebase for iOS and Android, or invest in two native codebases? There's no universal answer, but there is a clear way to think about it.

Flutter wins when your app is primarily UI-driven — content apps, marketplaces, booking platforms, internal tools. A single codebase means one team, one release cycle, and features ship to both platforms at once. For most of the Indian startups and SMBs we work with, this cuts development cost by 30-40% compared to maintaining two native apps.

Native pulls ahead when you're leaning heavily on platform-specific capabilities — deep camera/AR integration, background processing tied to OS internals, or when you need every last millisecond of performance for something like a gaming or AR app. It also matters if your team already has strong iOS/Android specialists and no bandwidth to pick up a new stack.

Our rule of thumb: start with Flutter unless you have a concrete, named reason not to. We've shipped both approaches for clients and the deciding factor is almost always the product's core interaction model, not team preference.