From a design standpoint I don't see effort from Flutter to look and feel native to iOS. Hamburger menus and details like the sharing icon might be great on Android, but it's unclear if they're familiar to iOS users. Personally I tried Flutter's demo app associated with their announcement, and basics like scrolling stuttered on the latest iPhone hardware.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017-802/?time=1...

Most of the tutorials use Flutter's Material Components group of widgets. However, there is a built-in group called Cupertino which looks and behaves identical to iOS: https://flutter.dev/docs/development/ui/widgets/cupertino.

I built a small app last year on an iPhone 7 Plus and didn't have any problems with scroll stuttering that were not my fault. Techniques were the same for any UI platform: run in release mode, avoiding unnecessary rebuilds, and cell fixed geometry. Don't know which particular demo you've tried, but I wouldn't expect intro tutorials to cover everything. Or perhaps there was a recent regression.

I think developers worry far too much about platform native look and feel. Users don’t care, nice design, ease of use, ease of learning with intuitive obvious paths to functionality that solves their needs, is all they care about. Even developers as users don’t care, as proven by the success of VSCode.

I want to believe you are right. I have no experience in app development but before committing with Flutter, this is a big concern for me. If you take the app say, Tinder, I believe it has consistent design elements between IOS and Android except for a few pages like settings.

Is Flutter what Google uses for their iOS apps?

Every time I try to use Drive or Sheets on iOS, I get frustrated that nothing works right, and after 2 minutes I give up and make a mental note to view/edit the file when I get home. Then a month later, I think "It couldn't have been that bad...", and I repeat the process.

Intuitive and obvious means behaving like all their other apps I already have. That's how you achieve ease of learning. If they acted right but looked a little off, that might be fine. These apps are the opposite -- they look mostly correct, but act different -- which is the worst of both worlds.

I believe the Stadia app is the only mainstream Google iOS app that is written in Flutter. The rest are native apps (Swift/Objective C) but specifically implements Material design.

Users care when stuff doesn't work the way they expect, and those expectations are built from experience with other apps.

VSCode goes to great lengths to feel native on Mac, though it doesn't reach 100%.

For productivity apps I would agree. I personally don't care much for other apps. Good UX doesn't necessarily need native look IMHO

As someone starting out, would it be beneficial to learn flutter or go the kotlin way?

What are you starting out on? Kotlin has more web presence, but is pretty much Android-only on the mobile app side. Flutter is theoretically crossplatform with relatively low serverside mindshare.

I think kotlin is mostly used for android development and is a programming language. Flutter is mostly with cross platform development. It uses dart as programing language which is very easy and fast to learn.

Please do the proof-read, it contains typos and code errors which fails flutter app.

Thought it was about wing aeroelasticity at first.

You were wrong.

Is Flutter better or worse than React Native??