Flutter is much closer to a "game engine" as it draws it's components using Skia [1] compared to e.g. React Native that creates platform native elements. So you

Flutter is much closer to a "game engine" as it draws it's components using Skia [1] compared to e.g. React Native that creates platform native elements. So you are right, you won't get the underlying platform's widgets. Flutter should act as an intermediary and make this as frictionless as possible though so OS level changes will be propagated or exposed by Flutter or your app directly accesses them but I have no practical experiance in this. This is not always so cut and dry awful as you might think though. The platform native widgets also have limitations and expectations that might not fit your vision of the app so even fully "native" apps might re-invent the wheel in a couple of places to make things work as they want. Also I've hardly ever come accross an application that works by just combining the basic platform widgets and not look and feel pretty basic. Also cross platform apps not respecting e.g. Zoom, Resolution, Orientation, A11y, etc. is more often than not, just the developer's not implementing the required things. The framework might support all of these use-cases but not fully automatic in some cases. [1] https://skia.org/ https://skia.org/