What is Flutter and why use it?

Flutter does something unusual: instead of wrapping the platform's own buttons and lists, it draws every pixel itself onto a canvas and compiles to native ARM code. That is why an interface looks and behaves identically on both platforms, and why animation stays smooth — the layout and paint work happens in Flutter's own engine rather than being translated to two different native toolkits.

The costs are real but narrow. Binaries are larger than a pure native equivalent because the engine ships with the app, and if you need a very new or very niche hardware capability you may find no maintained plugin and end up writing platform code anyway. You also still need real platform knowledge for signing, permissions and store submission — Flutter removes the duplicated UI work, not the two ecosystems.