Flutter vs React Native for Mobile Apps: What Laravel Devs Say in 2025

I recently asked my Laravel audience on three platforms - Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube - what they prefer to create mobile apps with. Let's review the results and comments from 2,000+ votes.

The Question

Here's how I formulated the question.

Results: The Numbers

Here's the overall table result:

Separately, here are three tables from different social platforms.

So, all in all, React Native is the favorite platform, but by a tiny margin, Flutter is also very popular.

I also received 100+ comments from all those posts combined. Let's review them.

Comments on React Native

Here are the pros/cons mentioned on React Native.

Positive Comments

Most people emphasize the power of React + React Native, and they also mention the Native APIs.

• "I use React Native because I already have experience with React. When I read the documentation for React Native, I found the syntax to be very similar to React, which made it easier to get started."

• "I know React and can use React Native."

• "Our company uses React Native because it's the closest we can get to native without maintaining 2 codebases."

• "When I found out React could do both web & mobile, I decided to dive into it."

• "It has almost the same syntax as React, and tailwind can now be used in RN as well (via nativewind package)."

• "It can now communicate directly with native APIs without being bottlenecked by the old JS bridge, which has been replaced by the new Native Module system."

Negative Comments

Some people pointed out complexity challenges, documentation gaps and UI component issues.

• "Every year I try React Native and still feel it's overengineered for my app."

• "Something I'm struggling with and cannot find any good resources is how to add ads to React Native apps... Setting up Google Admob is extremely confusing."

• "If making widgets wasn't a pain in the ass I would say so, but no..." suggesting difficulties with certain UI components.

Comments on Flutter

Here's what people had to say about Flutter.

Positive Comments

People emphasize good developer experience and built-in functionality.

• "Flutter. Pros: Easy to learn. Supports everything I need. Large package ecosystem."

• "Flutter, because I don't have to install another library just to navigate to other pages."

• "Because of Modular elements,".

• "Flutter has more 'official stuff' and more 'solid'."

Negative Comments

Some developers mention learning Dart, issues with maintenance, and the lack of native APIs (compared to React Native).

• "I tried to learn Flutter, but since it requires knowledge of Dart, I realized it would take me a lot more time to learn it."

• "Did not see any compelling reason to learn Dart and Flutter, just to use Flutter."

• "If you put it down for a few months and come back to it, the updates break everything! Sometimes I spend more time fixing the environment than coding."

• "We tried Flutter but we don't like that it doesn't use native APIs (they built their own implementation)."

Other Technologies: Popularity and Comments

More than 15% of the people chose "Other" as an option. I've analyzed the comments, and here's the table of the top technologies they mentioned:

Here are some quotes from the comments:

PWA (Progressive Web Apps)

• "I use PWA for mobile apps, I know its not really apps, but making 2 different programs (web and app) for exactly same purpose is too much work and cost for me."

Ionic Framework

• "I build with Ionic Framework, I have known Angular for a very long time. So, my best shot to build app was to use Ionic Framework."
• "Ionic Framework and Vue. Perfect for 'presentation'-apps that requires no hardware acceleration or hardware features."

Capacitor

• "I'm using capacitor with ionic and angular(can be vue or react too) for almost 10 years now. Pretty happy with it."

NativePHP

• "I'm eagerly awaiting Nativephp. Have you ever thought about developing native apps with Laravel!"
• "NativePHP, it seems promising for Laravel/PHP devs - no need to learn another language, truly cross platform (desktop included)."

Native Development (Kotlin/Swift)

• "Native Android, always. But I am eager to try Flutter."
• "iOS and Android both native whenever possible - just to feel something."

Quasar

• "Quasar if it can handle the project. React Native as fallback."
• "Vue.js either quasar or vuetify along with Capacitor framework. Same codebase works on mobile just fine."

Tauri

• "Tauri is also a way to build mobile apps, but I will say it's not as advanced as react native. You can use it to build both mobile and desktop apps."

Want to Learn Flutter / React Native?

• For Flutter, we recently released this course: Flutter 3 Mobile App with Laravel 12 API

• For React Native, we're currently in process of creating a similar course, due to release in May 2025. Want to find out when it's released? The best way is to subscribe to my weekly Laravel newsletter, where I share 10+ useful Laravel links to read/watch, every Thursday.

What do you think? Would you add something to those social media comments about mobile development for Laravel developers?