Listen. I adore Flutter. Like, I’m talking full-on, butterflies-in-my-stomach, swipe-right-every-time kind of love. It's beautiful, modern, and powerful. It lets me build for Android and iOS (and more!) with one codebase, which is honestly chef’s kiss. Flutter has been the MVP of my career as a mobile dev. But even in the healthiest relationships, you have fights, right? And me and Flutter... we have some fights. Sometimes it gaslights me. Sometimes I wake up and wonder if I made the right choice.

So this isn’t a hate post. It’s not a breakup letter. It’s more of a... vent. A good ol’ "I love you but what are you even doing right now???" post.

Here are 10 things that make me mad about Flutter, even though I wouldn’t trade it for anything else (well… maybe for a decent debugging experience 👀).

1. Flutter Is Basically an Android-iOS Power Couple — Everyone Else Feels Like a Third Wheel

Flutter is amazing for building cross-platform apps for Android and iOS. No cap. The consistency of UI across devices, the performance (thanks to Skia), and the sheer beauty of apps you can make? Chef’s kiss. 🍝 You can literally write one codebase and push to both platforms with near-native performance. That’s a superpower.

but try building for web, Windows, macOS, or Linux, and it suddenly feels like Flutter just kinda... tolerates those platforms. Like, it’s there, sure—but not in the “I love you” kind of way. More like the “fine, you can come too” kind of way.

  • Flutter Web: It exists. It runs. But you’ll quickly run into performance issues, weird layout bugs, SEO limitations, and features that just don’t work unless you’re using experimental flags, dark magic, or sacrificing your firstborn to the Flutter gods.
  • Flutter Desktop (Windows/macOS/Linux): It’s “stable,” yes. But stable like a Jenga tower after a party. Missing widgets, half-baked plugin support, input weirdness, and rendering issues are all part of the fun. Basic things like file pickers or system tray integration? Good luck finding a plugin that works and is maintained.

And let’s not forget that almost every tutorial, package, and even Flutter’s own docs will quietly assume:

“Yeah, you’re building for mobile, right? Android and iOS? Cool cool cool…”

So when you're trying to make your Flutter app truly cross-platform—like one codebase ruling everything—you’ll find yourself writing more and more platform-specific hacks, custom plugins, or just giving up and telling your users:

“Please open this on your phone… it works better there.”

Flutter is a brilliant mobile SDK pretending to be a full-on multi-platform framework. And maybe it’ll get there someday (Godspeed, Flutter team), but right now, if you’re not targeting Android or iOS, you're playing the game on hard mode with half the controller buttons not working.

2. It's All Fake. Nothing Is Native. I'm Living in a Simulation

Yes, Flutter is beautiful. Yes, their Material and Cupertino widgets are 99% accurate. But you know what that missing 1% feels like? The uncanny valley of app development.

You ever use a Cupertino widget and think “Hmm. This kinda looks like iOS, but it doesn’t feel like iOS”? That’s because Flutter doesn’t render native components. It paints everything on a canvas.

That’s why, even though it looks like an iPhone, sometimes iOS users can smell it’s not native. Like a dog sniffing out fear.

React Native, Xamarin — heck, even Jetpack Compose — all have more native feel out of the box. Flutter? Flutter is cosplaying. A convincing cosplay, but cosplay nonetheless.

Still, credit where it’s due: the consistency across platforms is a massive win. I get fewer bugs from device to device. But sometimes I miss that warm, native embrace. Flutter is like a shapeshifter — cool as hell, but you're always slightly on edge.

3. The Debug Console is Gaslighting Me

Okay. Imagine this. You accidentally put too much padding in a Column and there's an overflow. Flutter:
“████████ Exception caught by rendering library ████████”
“RenderFlex children have non-zero flex but... bla bla bla”
StackTrace.java.12983:500 --> CoreRender:154 → Flutter Hellfire:666”

And you scroll. And scroll. And eventually you find out it’s just... an overflow. That’s it. All that drama for a red bar at the bottom.

Flutter team, I love you. But I’m not reading all that. Just give me a nice little toast saying “Column overflowed. Fix padding. Love you 😘” and move on.

Also, why does the debugger just... give up sometimes? You know what I’m talking about. That moment when everything freezes, hot reload doesn’t work, and the app decides “Actually, I don’t want to run anymore.”

4. Hot Reload Be Like: I Was Good, Yeah I'm Gone Now

Hot reload was one of Flutter’s crown jewels. I remember the first time I used it. I was like “This is the future.” And it is... until it breaks. Then it’s just “This is pain.”

As your app grows, your compile times get longer. Your reloads stop working reliably. Your restarts take 20-30 seconds. You can feel the productivity slipping away, like tears in rain.

You ever add a const keyword and wait 25 seconds to see it reflected? You ever move a widget 3 pixels and spend a coffee break waiting for it to show up? Yeah, same.

Credit again: it still beats the pants off recompiling a full native Android app. But man... the speed curve really drops off once your app hits puberty.

5. Plugin Graveyard: Welcome to the Abandoned Carnival

In React Native or Swift, you’ve got company-backed packages and SDKs. In Flutter? It’s usually just some guy. And I love those guys. I’ve been those guys. But it becomes a problem when they get a job at Meta and vanish into the mist.

You ever rely on a plugin like flutter_image_editor_super (not a real one probably) and then boom — no updates for 2 years. Issues open, PRs ignored. You end up maintaining someone else’s side project because your app can’t move forward otherwise.

Flutter desperately needs more long-term plugin support. And not just Google packages. Like, actual community efforts with funding and maintenance.

6. Compilation Time Increases Like a Netflix Season Finale Twist

At the start? It’s fast. Butter smooth. You think you’re Neo in the Matrix. But as your app grows — 20, 30, 50+ screens — suddenly you feel like you’re compiling Chrome itself.

And when that hot reload starts needing a hot restart, and your hot restart starts needing a cold shower and a long walk... you realize: size does matter.

There’s a real, unavoidable bottleneck here. I’m not saying Flutter should magically compile your 300MB app in 0.2s. But I am saying that waiting 2 minutes to debug a typo is not the life I imagined.

7. **Flutter Is Popular, But Not Popular-Popular

It's trendy, yes. But is it React Native popular? Not quite.

You won’t always find the answers you need on StackOverflow. Half the time, Google will serve you a GitHub issue from 2021 with the comment: “Closed as not reproducible.”

Also, finding devs who know Flutter? Easier than it was in 2019, but still a challenge. Finding senior devs? A rarer breed. This matters if you're building a team or looking for jobs in certain regions.

It’s growing, for sure. But it's not the One True Cross-Platform Messiah just yet.

8. Flutter Team Is Tiny, and So Are My Hopes

The Flutter team is doing the Lord’s work, but let’s be real — they’re small. Like, that group project where one person’s doing 90% of the work kind of small.

So when Apple releases a new iOS feature?
Or Android changes how foreground services work?
Or you want some fancy native integration?

You wait. Sometimes for months. And that’s not on the devs — it’s just a resource issue.

The development pace is, well, glacial. It gets there eventually. But the journey is long, and full of deprecations.

9. Stop Deprecating and Undeprecating Things Like It's a TikTok Trend

Flutter is not afraid to evolve. And that’s honestly one of its biggest strengths. The team doesn’t shy away from refactoring core concepts, improving APIs, and cleaning up legacy patterns. It shows they care about the long-term health of the framework, and that’s commendable. Seriously, kudos.

Can we chill? Like please, just a little?

I feel like every time I update Flutter, the SDK sits me down like a therapist and goes,

“So, we need to talk about some of the things you thought you knew.”

Let's take a quick tour of the chaos museum:

  • First, there was FlatButton, RaisedButton, and OutlineButton.
    Gone.
    Replaced by TextButton, ElevatedButton, and OutlinedButton.
    Alright, cool — modernization. I’ll allow it.

  • But then suddenly, withOpacity is deprecated.
    Like, what did withOpacity do to you? We’ve been using that since the dawn of time. Now we’re told to use withAlpha or withValues, and I’m just sitting here rewriting perfectly working code because someone at Google had an epiphany.

  • And oh boy, don’t even get me started on back navigation:

    • First there was WillPopScope.
    • Then came PopScope.
    • Then suddenly onWillPop is the new thing, but it’s attached to something else entirely.
    • Am I supposed to know which one to use per platform now? Why is back button handling becoming a philosophical dilemma?

Every release lately feels like a box of chocolates, except half of them are filled with breaking changes and silent deprecations. Even ScaffoldMessenger popped out of nowhere like,

"Hey, forget Scaffold.of(context).showSnackBar() — I’m your dad now."

This constant shifting makes Flutter feel unstable — not in the “it crashes a lot” way, but in the “do I even trust this for a long-term project?” kind of way.

As someone who actually loves Flutter, this gives me anxiety. I want to recommend it to companies, to teams, to other devs… but it’s hard to say,

“Yeah, just go all-in on Flutter,”
...when the API might literally change between now and the next quarterly planning meeting.

We need confidence. We need stability. We don’t need to keep learning new widget lifecycles every other month like it’s a Pokémon evolution chain:
FlatButton → RaisedButton → ElevatedButton → FlutterZard EX

Flutter, baby, you’re doing amazing things. But can we have like… just one LTS version that doesn't rewrite history?

10. Slow App Startup & Chunky App Size: The Heavyweight Champion

Even a basic Flutter app is chonky. Like 20MB+ at minimum. That’s a lot, especially when you're doing over-the-air updates or targeting low-end devices.

Also, cold starts? Slow. Flutter apps take a while to warm up. The runtime, the rendering engine, the whole shebang — it needs to spin up before you see your first pixel.

That’s a problem in markets where speed and size matter. That’s a problem when you want your splash screen to be more than a waiting room.

Still, once it is up? It’s smooth. It’s fast. It’s responsive. But that cold boot… oof.

In Conclusion: Flutter, I Love You. But You Stress Me Out.

Despite all this — all the plugin chaos, the debug drama, the startup delays — I still love Flutter. It’s still the best dev experience I’ve had. It’s still enabling me to build beautiful apps faster than anything else out there. But love isn’t blind.

We can appreciate something and call out its flaws. We can praise the vision and criticize the execution. That’s what this is.

So if you’re a Flutter dev nodding along with this, just know: you’re not alone. And if you’re new to Flutter, don’t let this scare you off. It’s a fantastic platform — just bring snacks and patience.

Oh and Flutter team — if you’re reading this, I love you. Please fix the debugger. ❤️