We will use Flutter for our athlete-facing mobile app. Flutter is a cross-platform app development framework, which boasts native performance and allows for creating beautiful, fluid user interfaces.

React Native may sound like a more appropriate option given our choice of frontend technologies, but we foresee little to no feature overlap in the web dashboard and mobile app. Ease of use, performance, good user experiences are key to encouraging athletes to use our app, something which React Native makes difficult, and is where Flutter excels.

We will use the test and flutter_test packages to test our Flutter app

We chose Flutter since we are developing a mobile application that needs to be performant (to handle displaying large amounts of data and video uploading) and would cover both Android and iOS systems. Since we want the app to be cross-platform, two frameworks comes in to mind: Flutter and React Native. As shown below, Flutter's performance and out-of-the-box support impressed us to pick it as our framework for our mobile app.

React Native has been a dominant force in cross-platform app development since its launch by Facebook. The ability to write React-like code and have it compile to both iOS and Android makes developing mobile apps much easier. However, the overhead done to bridge Javascript code into native code means React Native apps might not be as performant. Moreover, React Native, much like React, is an unopinionated framework that covers minimal functionality out-of-the-box. This means that most functionalities would have to be relied on third-party libraries or developers would have to write their own native code.

Flutter, on the other hand, is a much newer framework developed by Google. While Flutter uses Dart, a relatively new language compared to JS, syntax-wise it is similar enough to that a JS developer should be able to pick it up in no time. The Flutter engine also compiles directly into native code, making it more performant when compared with React Native. Flutter is also an opinionated framework, with a much large stack of Widgets to choose from out-of-the-box. The Widgets are also designed according to Material design principles, making styling easier.

I've made 6 professional/business applications with React Native before choosing Flutter/Dart for the new version of WinMinuteConso (historical in Ionic...). Multi Platform is far more stable, Dart is far more powerful, the whole process is really better... It is just hard to find the proper software architecture...