Thanks for the comment. From talking to React Native developers, my understanding is that the “native driver” doesn’t work for all animations (for example, if the animation is based on a value coming from the outside world). That’s why it is optional and not on by default.

There was a short talk at the recent Dart Conference that referenced just this issue. The talk showed how in Flutter you can solve the problem of what to do when you have an animation that has already started, but because of some change in the data model you want the current animation to be interrupted and a new animation started. That is a common problem that can be solved in Flutter because the animation is being done in user space.

I really like React Native and think it was a huge step forward. I’m just trying to explain the new things in Flutter.