Problem Statement
Compare Flutter with native Android/iOS development. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?
Explanation
Flutter's main advantage is writing code once and deploying to multiple platforms (iOS, Android, web, desktop) from a single codebase, dramatically reducing development time and maintenance costs. Hot reload speeds up development iterations, and the widget-based UI system makes building complex interfaces easier than native approaches. Flutter apps have consistent behavior across platforms and excellent performance comparable to native apps.
Native development provides the best access to platform-specific features immediately when they're released, better integration with platform conventions and behaviors, and slightly better performance in edge cases since there's no abstraction layer. Native apps can leverage platform-specific UI patterns naturally, and you get the full native development ecosystem and tooling support.
Flutter's disadvantages include larger app sizes (Flutter engine adds 4-8 MB), potential delays accessing new platform features until Flutter supports them, and needing platform channels for some native functionality. Native development disadvantages include maintaining separate codebases for each platform (doubling development effort), slower development cycles without hot reload, and UI code that's platform-specific and not reusable.
Choose Flutter when you want fast development, cross-platform consistency, beautiful custom UIs, and need good-enough performance for most use cases. Choose native when you need absolute best performance, immediate access to new platform features, deep platform integration, or are building platform-specific features that wouldn't benefit from cross-platform development.
