Not emulated. Painted at the OS level, same as native controls. Uses https://skia.org/. I second the grandparent poster's opinion about runtime speed and developer productivity, but Flutter is still not mature enough for production.
They’re “emulated” in the sense that they are custom widgets designed to mimic the appearance and behavior of widgets from the OS’s native UI framework. They’re fine from a performance perspective, AFAIK, but you run the risk of the replicas imperfectly emulating some aspect of the originals’ behavior and creating an “uncanny valley” effect.
Emulated in the sense that it's a separate rendering of the components versus using the OS's components directly.
You're right; what word would fit something that is not the real deal, but is crafted in a way to be almost indiscernible? Would it be, emu... emula... oh it's just on the tip of my tongue.
You are correct but I obviously disagree on not mature enough for production, I’m in production with paying users. :)
I'm glad to hear that. Let me know your experiences. We've a customer base of about 0.5 million, and ours is a mission critical system. Which is why I'm currently reluctant to use Flutter, even though I'm a huge fan.