Need advice on app development

Going to share my perspective here but I think in the end, it's based on what you already know.

I see a lot of positivity around React Native with Expo. If you already know React and don't have much other preference towards the other options, you won't likely go wrong there.

When I have mobile app ideas, I usually just don't build them because I super do not enjoy using React and the other options on the market seem to fail me in some way. Plus I am super pro-web as it is.

I have used Ionic and the experience was good enough and I was able to build what I wanted, but you can always tell it's a hybrid app by way of the little performance hiccups that happen (jank). To their credit, it's still awesome for development speed if you have a web background and provides a lot of flexibility for you to bring your own JS framework.

I have used Flutter as a way to try to get the smooth performance and app-like feel. As a frontend web dev (exclusively, minus JS backends) as my background, Flutter is incredibly weird to get used to. Building the UI through these huge nested data trees just never clicked for me. I never finished this project due to how slow the development was going and I lost interest. Plus, there's always whispers of Google killing the product anyways. That said, the performance and smoothness was exquisite. More likely a personal problem here for Flutter.

There's definitely other tools out there that others may be able to comment on. Good luck!

Bubble is releasing native apps in 6 months, I guess if you can wait a little longer you might want to try it out?

We specialize in nocode development on Bubble.io at nocodeventure.com, native apps are just not that great atm.

I built GoPilotX with Flutter. You can see the screenshots on the playstore. In terms of development ease and speed it is very hard to beat. However if you need to do a lot of platform specific things like integrate with third party hardware devices you will run into some limitations. If you are basically taking a website and turning it into an app I cannot recommend Flutter enough.

The conversion to Ios is trickier than just Android IF you are doing a lot of custom platform-specific work but for a standard app that won't be an issue and now some pipelines can automate the conversion for you.

Also dart is a very easy language to pick up. No CSS to worry about.

Hi! I have built multiple apps in the last few years. These days the best way I would suggest is to build a PWA (progressive web app) which helps in getting to all iOS, Android and Web platforms with the same core code base. My company is based out of India. We also help in building MVPs of ideas with very high quality user experience and at a very affordable cost. Just Google Kuberanix and let me know if I can help.

Have you looked into react native?

have you considered just choosing one OS that you are comfortable with developing in since you said 8 years ago you dabbled in just to test out your idea (I mean choosing android/ios)? There are a lot of resources for native app development for UIKit, SwiftUI, and Kotlin for Android. From my experience, going on youtube and tutorials, and general debugging there is a large enough community for any issue you run into

I've used both React Native + Expo and Flutter to build cross-platform apps. Assuming that you're not doing anything out of the ordinary, either option will allow you to build a usable app fairly quickly. React Native will feel more familiar if you come from a web development background.

If I was to build a new mobile app today, I'd choose Flutter. While I am less familiar with Flutter (and Dart by extension), it felt like it was more fit for purpose when it came to building apps. React Native felt like another layer of separation.

As the other comment mentioned, there are always rumblings of Google killing off their projects. I think Flutter is relatively safe and there are a couple of fairly large apps built on top of it.