React Native vs Flutter: What to Choose for Your Ecommerce App?

Ask any developer which framework is best for mobile apps in 2025 and you will trigger a debate.

React Native fans point to the huge JavaScript ecosystem and over the air updates. Flutter loyalists rave about the Skia rendering engine and pixel perfect widgets.

If you are an ecommerce director or CTO, this is not just a debate about bridges versus compilers. It is a high stakes decision that will shape your hiring plan, maintenance budget, and time to market for years.

Both frameworks are strong. Both solve the cross platform problem so you can avoid running separate Swift and Kotlin teams. But in ecommerce they share a critical flaw that is easy to miss: they assume you need to build your app from scratch.

For an ecommerce brand, this choice is not really about syntax, rendering engines, or developer taste. It is a business decision with six figure implications tied to launch speed, long term maintenance, talent availability, and ROI.

In this guide, we will go beyond shallow comparisons, unpack the real costs of each framework for ecommerce, and then challenge the question itself. Because for most established brands, building a fully custom app from zero is actually the wrong move.

React Native for Ecommerce

Launched by Facebook in 2015, React Native revolutionized mobile development by allowing developers to build native apps using JavaScript, the language of the web. For nearly a decade, it has been the dominant force in cross-platform development.

To understand React Native’s strengths and weaknesses, you have to understand how it works under the hood.

React Native uses a "bridge" architecture. Your application logic runs in a JavaScript thread, just like a web app.

When you want to render a button or a view, that message is sent across a "bridge" to the native side (iOS or Android), which then renders the actual native component.

The Good: The app looks and feels native because it is native. A scroll view in React Native is a real UIScrollView on iOS.

The Bad: The bridge can become a bottleneck. If you try to send too much data across it too quickly—like complex animations or massive product lists—traffic gets jammed, leading to dropped frames and "janky" scrolling.

Note: React Native’s* New Architecture (Fabric and TurboModules) is actively solving this by replacing the bridge with JSI (JavaScript Interface), allowing direct communication between JS and C++. However, adoption is still ongoing.

The Pros

The Massive Talent Pool

This is React Native’s killer feature. Because it is built on JavaScript and React, the talent pool is effectively infinite. If you have a web development team, they likely already know React.

Transitioning a web developer to React Native takes weeks, not months, which means hiring is faster, cheaper, and less risky. You aren't hunting for niche specialists, and you can scale your team up and down easily.

A Mature, Battle-Tested Ecosystem

React Native has been around longer than Flutter, and it shows.

The ecosystem is vast. Need a Stripe integration? A Klaviyo SDK? A complex image carousel? Chances are, there is a battle-tested React Native library for it.

For ecommerce, this is critical.

You rely on dozens of third-party tools. React Native’s maturity means these integrations are often plug-and-play, whereas in newer frameworks, you might have to build them yourself.

Over-the-Air (OTA) Updates

This is a superpower for ecommerce managers. With tools like Microsoft’s CodePush, React Native allows you to push updates to your app’s JavaScript bundle directly to users' devices, bypassing the slow App Store review process.

Scenario: It’s Black Friday. You spot a typo on your hero banner or a bug in your checkout flow. With a compiled language (like Flutter or Swift), you’d have to submit a new binary to Apple, wait 24-48 hours for approval, and hope users update.

With React Native, you can push a hotfix instantly.

The Cons

UI Inconsistency

Because React Native uses the device’s native components, a button on iOS looks like an iOS button, and on Android, it looks like an Android button.

While this sounds good, it can be a headache if you want a 100% identical, branded UI across both platforms. You often have to write platform-specific code or use heavy styling libraries to force consistency.

Maintenance Complexity

React Native is notorious for "breaking changes." Upgrading to a new version of React Native can sometimes break your dependencies, leading to days of debugging "dependency hell." For a lean ecommerce team, this maintenance overhead is a real cost.

Best For: Teams with strong JS skills, apps needing deep native integrations, and brands that prioritize OTA updates.

Examples: Shopify, Walmart, Wix, Tesla.

Shopify has even documented its migration to React Native in detail on its engineering blog.

Flutter for Ecommerce

Released by Google in 2017, Flutter took a radically different approach. Instead of using native components, Flutter draws every single pixel on the screen itself using its own rendering engine (Skia, and now Impeller). It’s more like a game engine than a traditional app framework.

Flutter doesn't use a bridge. It compiles your code (written in Dart) directly into native machine code (ARM) for iOS and Android. It then uses the Skia graphics engine to "paint" the UI onto the screen canvas.

The Good: Total control. You aren't at the mercy of the OEM’s UI components.

The Bad: The app size is larger because it has to bundle the engine, and it doesn't "feel" exactly like a native system app (though it’s very close).

The Pros

Pixel-Perfect UI Consistency

Because Flutter draws its own widgets, your app looks exactly the same on a $100 Android phone as it does on the newest iPhone 15 Pro. You have total control over every pixel.

For luxury fashion brands, streetwear labels, or design-heavy retailers, this is a huge plus. You can create custom, brand-specific animations and transitions that behave consistently everywhere.

Superior Performance

By skipping the JavaScript bridge, Flutter can achieve consistently higher frame rates (60fps or even 120fps) more easily than React Native, especially for complex animations.

The app feels incredibly smooth and responsive, which contributes to a premium user experience. The new Impeller rendering engine further eliminates "jank" by pre-compiling shaders, making animations buttery smooth.

Developer Velocity (Hot Reload)

Flutter’s "Hot Reload" is legendary. Developers can change code and see the result on the screen in sub-seconds, without losing the app’s state.

This speeds up the UI design process significantly, allowing for rapid prototyping and iteration.

The Cons

The Dart Learning Curve

Flutter uses Dart, a language created by Google. While it is a modern, type-safe language, it is not JavaScript. Your web developers cannot just jump in, so you will likely need to hire specialized Flutter developers.

Good Flutter developers are in high demand and often command a premium, and if your lead Flutter dev leaves, replacing them is harder than replacing a React Native dev.

Smaller Ecosystem (But Growing)

While catching up fast, Flutter’s library of third-party packages is still smaller than React Native’s.

You might find that a specific niche payment provider or loyalty tool has a React Native SDK but no official Flutter SDK yet.

This forces you to write "Platform Channels" (custom native code) to bridge the gap, which increases cost and complexity.

Best For: Brands needing a highly custom, unconventional, or "game-like" UI; startups building from scratch; teams willing to bet on Google’s tech stack.

Examples: Alibaba (Xianyu app), eBay Motors, Philips Hue, Nubank.

Comparison Table

Let’s summarize the battle for ecommerce dominance in 2025. For a deeper dive, check out our full guide on React Native vs Flutter.

If you are building a new product from scratch, Flutter is arguably the better technology purely from a performance and UI standpoint. However, React Native is often the smarter business decision due to the abundance of talent and the massive ecosystem.

But wait.

Before you call your CTO and pick a side, you need to ask yourself a much more important question.

Why are you building from scratch at all?

The Hidden Cost of Both

Here is the dirty secret of mobile app development that agencies won’t tell you: Building a custom native app (whether with React Native or Flutter) is often a massive strategic error for established ecommerce brands.

Why?

Because you are not a startup. You are an established brand. You already have a website.

And not just any website. You have a Shopify, Magento, Salesforce, or WooCommerce store that you have spent years optimizing.

Think about the investment you’ve poured into your web store:

• The Checkout Flow: You’ve A/B tested every field, every button color, every step to minimize abandonment.
• The Tech Stack: You’ve integrated Yotpo for reviews, Klaviyo for email, Gorgias for support, a complex search engine (Algolia/Klevu), a loyalty program (Smile/Yotpo), and a dozen other tools.
• The Merchandising: Your team knows exactly how to manage the catalog, update banners, and run promotions on the web.

When you decide to build a React Native or Flutter app, you are throwing all of that away.

You are starting from zero.

This is one of the main reasons why ecommerce mobile apps fail, they become a resource sink that diverts focus from the core business.

The "Re-Implementation" Nightmare

React Native and Flutter apps cannot simply "read" your website’s logic.

They are separate pieces of software, so you have to re-code everything: re-build the product page layout, re-integrate the payment gateway, re-connect the search engine, and re-implement the loyalty program API.

If you use 20 plugins on your Shopify store, you need to find 20 matching SDKs for your app or pay developers to build custom API connections for each one. It is a massive duplication of effort.

The Maintenance Trap

Once you launch your custom app, you now have two platforms to manage.

Imagine you want to add a "Buy Now, Pay Later" option like Klarna: you add it to the website in one click, but then you have to pay your app developers to build a custom integration for the app, which takes three weeks.

The result is that your app constantly lags behind your website, your marketing team gets frustrated because they can't run the same campaigns on both, and your dev team is overwhelmed maintaining two codebases.

The True Cost Breakdown

A decent custom ecommerce app built with React Native or Flutter is not a $20,000 project. As we detail in our guide on how much it costs to build an ecommerce app, the real numbers for a mid-market brand are significant:

• Design (UI/UX): $15,000 - $25,000
• Frontend Dev (iOS/Android): $40,000 - $80,000
• Backend/API Integration: $20,000 - $40,000
• QA & Testing: $10,000
• Project Management: $15,000
• Total Upfront Cost: $100,000 - $170,000+

And that’s just to launch. You then face $30,000+ per year in maintenance costs just to keep the lights on (bug fixes, iOS updates, API changes).

For most brands, this math simply doesn't work.

You want the result of an app (retention, push notifications, brand presence), but you don't need the process of building software from scratch.

The Third Option: MobiLoud

This is where MobiLoud changes the game.

MobiLoud is not a DIY app builder. And it’s not a dev agency.

It is a fully-managed service that converts your existing, high-converting website into a premium native mobile app.

How MobiLoud’s Architecture Works

MobiLoud uses a native app architecture. We build a full-featured native app (using native code) that handles all the mobile-specific features—navigation tab bar, push notifications, native settings, splash screens.

Inside that app, your existing mobile website is displayed as the content layer.

This is distinct from simple React Native alternatives. It’s a supercharged, native-feeling experience. We remove all the "web" elements (browser address bars, footers, clutter) and blend the web content seamlessly with the native navigation.

You can read more about native vs hybrid ecommerce apps to understand the technical nuances.

Why This Wins for Ecommerce

You Keep Your Optimization: Remember that optimized checkout flow you spent years perfecting? It works instantly in the app.

Your reviews, your search, your loyalty program, your upsell pop-ups? They all work instantly.

Because the app is displaying your website, you achieve 100% feature parity on Day 1. There is no "re-implementation" nightmare. If it works on your site, it works in your app.

Zero Maintenance Overhead: This is the killer feature for marketing teams.

When you update your website, change a banner, add a product, install a new plugin, your app updates instantly.

There is no second codebase to manage. There is no need to call a developer to update the app just because you changed your homepage layout.

Your website is the single source of truth.

Speed and Cost: Because we aren't rebuilding your store from scratch, we’ll launch your app in around 4 weeks.

And the cost? A fraction of custom development. You pay a small setup fee and a monthly subscription that covers all ongoing maintenance, updates, and support.

Real-World Success Stories: Major retailers are already using this approach to win on mobile:

• Jack & Jones: The global fashion giant used MobiLoud to launch high-end shopping apps that run directly off their existing Salesforce Commerce Cloud store, maintaining a consistent brand experience while avoiding a multi-year rebuild.
• buybuyBaby: An iconic baby and kids retailer that needed to relaunch its mobile apps after an acquisition. With MobiLoud, they re-established their mobile presence quickly and cut app development costs by over 90%, while keeping the web and app experience perfectly in sync.

Who is MobiLoud For?

MobiLoud is the perfect fit for mid-market and enterprise brands that:

• Already have a mobile-optimized website (Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Salesforce, etc.).
• Want to drive retention and LTV through push notifications.
• Don't want to hire a separate mobile dev team.
• Want to launch fast (weeks, not months).

If you are a startup building the next Uber or a game, use Flutter.

But if you are a retailer selling products, MobiLoud is the smartest path to the App Store.

If you're on Shopify specifically, you can dive deeper in our guide on why your Shopify store needs a mobile app.

Final Thoughts

The debate between React Native and Flutter is fascinating for developers, but for ecommerce founders and managers, it’s often a distraction.

Your goal isn't to own code. Your goal is to own your customer relationship.

You want to get on your customers' home screens, send them push notifications, and make it effortless for them to buy from you again.

You don't need to spend $150,000 and 9 months to do that. You don't need to rebuild what you've already built.

At MobiLoud, we’ve helped over 2,000 brands launch premium mobile apps without writing a line of code. We handle the submission, the approval, and the maintenance, so you can focus on selling.

Ready to see how your site would look as an app? Book a free consultation today and let’s discuss your mobile strategy.