There are roughly three honest answers to "what should I use to build a cross-platform mobile app?" depending on who's asking. They are: React Native, Flutter, or a code-generating tool that hands you React Native at the end. Anything else is either a niche fit (Capacitor, Ionic, Xamarin/MAUI for enterprise) or a no-code platform that you'll outgrow.

Most "top 10 cross-platform tools" articles list 14 things and rank them by alphabet. That isn't useful. The decision you're actually making is between three categories, and the right answer depends on who is going to maintain the code six months from now.

The categories that matter

React Native + Expo is what the majority of new cross-platform apps ship on in 2025. It's the default stack for Shopify, Discord, Coinbase, and a long tail of consumer apps. You write JavaScript or TypeScript, you get native iOS and Android binaries, and the developer experience with Expo Application Services is genuinely good. The downside is that you're hiring or being a JavaScript engineer.

Flutter is the strongest alternative. Dart is a fine language, the rendering pipeline is fast, and the widget library is consistent. It's overrepresented in apps that need precise UI control or that originated inside Google. The downside is the ecosystem is smaller than React Native's, and the talent pool is more specialized — when you go to hire, the difference is noticeable.

AI-generated React Native is the new third option. You describe the app, the model generates an Expo project, and you ship it. The output is the same React Native code you'd have written by hand, which means anything you can do in React Native, you can keep doing — including handing it to a senior mobile engineer to extend later.

Everything else falls into specific situations:

Capacitor / Ionic — fine if you have an existing web app and you want to wrap it with native APIs. Bad starting point if you're building from scratch and care about feel.
.NET MAUI — almost only chosen by enterprises with an existing C# codebase.
Native + Kotlin Multiplatform — for teams that want native UI on each platform but shared business logic. Great for some products, overkill for most.
No-code builders (Glide, Adalo, Bravo Studio, FlutterFlow) — useful for prototypes, tough to scale past mid-complexity apps.

How to actually choose

Three questions get you most of the way:

Who maintains the code in 18 months? If the answer is "an engineering team you'll hire," React Native gives you the largest pool. If the answer is "the person who built it (me, a non-engineer)," skip the frameworks entirely — you're not going to pick up Dart or fight a Metro bundler error from scratch, and an AI-generated project is more honest about that.

How custom does the app need to be? A normal CRUD app with auth, a feed, a profile, payments, and notifications is solidly in the wheelhouse of every option above. An app with custom rendering, real-time multiplayer, audio processing, or AR/ML pipelines pushes you toward React Native or Flutter — the no-code tools and AI-generated starters can do them, but you'll be writing custom code at some point regardless, so you might as well start there.

How fast do you need version one? Time-to-first-build is the deciding factor for most projects. React Native + Expo, with a senior engineer, is realistically 2–4 weeks for a basic v1. Flutter, similar. AI-generated projects collapse this to hours for the first build and 1–2 weeks for the polished version. Hand-rolling native iOS + Android in parallel is the slowest option and the only one nobody seriously argues for anymore.

Where Fastshot fits in this landscape

We're not pretending to be a fourth framework. Fastshot generates React Native + Expo. The output is the same code a senior mobile engineer would write — same project structure, same dependencies, same build process. What we replace is the first two months of writing it.

The reason that matters: most cross-platform projects don't fail because the framework was wrong. They fail because the team spent three weeks getting the auth flow right, two weeks fighting the navigation library, a month tweaking the UI to feel native, and by the time the app is on TestFlight, the original idea is a quarter old and the founder has moved on. Generating a working v1 in a day removes that failure mode.

You still need an engineer eventually, and you still need to make architectural decisions about state, data, and real-time. The generated code doesn't take those decisions away — it gets you to the point where you can make them with a working app in front of you instead of a blank repo.

The honest comparison

If you're a senior mobile engineer or you're hiring one, pick React Native + Expo (or Flutter, if you have a reason). The frameworks are mature, the documentation is good, and the long-term costs are predictable.

If you're not, the realistic choice is between a no-code platform and an AI generator. No-code is faster to a demo, slower past the demo, and traps you on a runtime you don't own. AI generation is roughly as fast to a demo, faster past it, and gives you exportable code you can hand to anyone.

The remaining question is "do you trust the generated code?" That's an empirical thing. Generate one, look at the output, run it, see how it handles edge cases. The answer is increasingly "yes, mostly," but you should verify on your own use case before committing.

Try Fastshot on a project you're actually planning to build.