React Native isn't a web wrapper. It uses a Javascript engine to render native iOS/Android components (unlike Flutter, which doesn't use native components, and instead renders everything from scratch).
Because Flutter has it's own rendering engine, it's inherently more consistent in refresh rates and UI components.
Although React Native shows Native elements, they vary slightly across different; devices, platforms, OS's etc.. this can create many weird edge cases, which makes it unreliable in some cases.
I'm actually investigating getting some skills on react native, but i've got the suspicion it isn't all sunshine and rainbows. From what i've seen so far, a real-world stack has many more dependencies other that react native itself, and becomes a convoluted mess.
However, i'm surprised that i haven't found a similar post to OP detailing real-world React Native pain points.
RN pain points are upgrading more than anything else. Also as a native dev I don’t understand why the JS dev ecosystem is full of disjointed tooling instead of just making the process more streamlined.
I have also developed a production flutter app for a client and am now working on a RN app for another. I like RN so much more just because I can create custom native views that use the platform toolkits. You can also share a lot of code with an SPA web app and set up a monorepo for everything pretty easily.
Flutter dev tools are incredible though and much easier to use than react native.
Snapchat like UI is definitely possible, but for the performance to be really good youd probably want to do something native. I consider that a good thing though. RN is better if you just treat it as the coordinator on top of native view components IMO.
I think this is mostly just a preference thing and may have to do whether you're coming from a React vs Native Mobile background. As a React developer, React Native was really amazing for me and made perfect sense. Flutter on the other hand, not so much.
Comparing languages is very different to compare these two SDKs. I've developed apps on both, and personally I've found Flutter significantly more solid and overall just better.
Everything is faster and just works (builds, hot reload etc.) on Flutter whereas on RN a lot of the things break constantly for no apparent reason. And all that weirdness like it might work if you rebuild a few more times in a row. Moreover, a lot of the debugging tools work exceedingly well on Flutter while trying to use even just the memory profiler crashes RN.
