It brings its own widget implementation, with themes that approach, but do not perfectly match the native toolkit.
The downside is, that it doesn't implement the platform look&feel perfectly. If you want fully custom look and feel, it might be not a bad thing, but those who aim at native experience, they will never reliably get it.
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On the other side of the debate, React Native, it is not all roses either. While it uses native widgets, it also runs JavaScript. And not just any JavaScript engine, or your preferred JS engine, but JSC. With JSC, RN team took their sweet time to support 64-bit Android properly, with issues rearing as late as 2020.
Before I started writing Flutter I had the same feeling. My first reaction to the Flutter design was "haha, it's not gonna work". But when I tried to make my first app I was shocked how good it was.
Since then I learned that most users do not give a s...t if it's pixel in pixel perfect copy of native components. Especially when Flutter team makes it literally pixel in pixel perfect to the native UI. I mean, it really doesn't matter in 99.99% cases in my experience (I have around 12 apps in Flutter atm).
So I see this Flutter design feature as huge upside, not a downside.
The downside is, that it doesn't implement the platform look&feel perfectly. If you want fully custom look and feel, it might be not a bad thing, but those who aim at native experience, they will never reliably get it.
---
On the other side of the debate, React Native, it is not all roses either. While it uses native widgets, it also runs JavaScript. And not just any JavaScript engine, or your preferred JS engine, but JSC. With JSC, RN team took their sweet time to support 64-bit Android properly, with issues rearing as late as 2020.