I spent three weekends building the same app twice. Not as an experiment — I had a real decision to make. We're adding a mobile companion to one of our internal tools at work, a task management system that runs on Spring Boot microservices. My team has touched Dart before; I'm more comfortable with JavaScript. Neither of us had shipped serious mobile work in the last two years. The only honest way to pick a stack was to build something real in both frameworks and compare what I found.
The app I built isn't a toy. It pulls tasks from a REST API, caches them locally with SQLite, fires scheduled push notifications when deadlines approach, and has smooth list animations on a bottom-nav layout with three tabs. Simple enough to build in a weekend. Complex enough to expose real differences between the two frameworks.
Here's what I found — including a result that surprised me.
The App
Before comparing, let me be specific about what I built. Both versions:
