The fact that Flutter is tied to Google is a huge reason in my eyes to not trust that it will survive long-term. I agree with others saying native is the way to go.
Flutter is also used by and contributed to by Alibaba and Baidu.
Ask HN: React Native or Flutter for a new app in 2023?
91–100 of 109 posts
Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter for a new app in 2023?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because your app will equally suck on all platforms?
Because your app will work on all platforms and the rest of the billions of app users outside of this little niche-of-a-niche-of-a-niche forum just want to do whatever they need to get done on a app in their normal lives and don't even know what you are talking about when you say the app "sucks" because it doesn't use exactly the right rounded corners on a button or the listview scroll physics are exactly same as a "…
Until the people wonder why it doesn’t do $x new feature that Apple released a year ago but there is no cross platform equivalent.
But more importantly, why it doesn’t take advantage of an accessibility feature that that a native app would get for free.
Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter for a new app in 2023?
#93As a user I tend to prefer React Native apps. Flutter feels distinctly off in some places (more on Android than on iOS) and apps made with it sometimes show serious slowdowns, which the native toolkits tend to not do.
Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter for a new app in 2023?
#94Native
+: Great performance, Compose (with multiplatform) is awesome, you also can write basically anything
-: Cost is at least 2-3x, if you use a lot of system dependent libraries (and you'll probably do), higher skill ceiling and harder learning curve (you'll have to learn everything - 5x of RN or Flutter)
RN
+: Shared web stack is a killer feature, easily pushable code, native look
-: Awful performance, the ecosystem is a bit beaten, lots of plugins are poorly supported
Flutter
+: Time to market is king, performance is fine, huge standard lib, superb libraries for state management, less tiresome to setup proper types than Typescript
-: Some long running issues like the lack of static metaprogramming are nuts, wonky threading, non-native look and feel is still (and will probably be) a thing, library support is okayish, could be better (especially, if google actually cared about basic features like a good http client, for example)
Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter for a new app in 2023?
#95Been thinking of the same question recently. Appreciate all comments sharing their experience. For those saying to native, I completely disagree. Going native for the same app running on multiple platforms will face the following issues: - hard to be consistent. - hard to get the exact same design especially when using native components. - release lags and platform specific bugs. Unless you want to block releases for…
> hard to be consistent
> hard to get the exact same design especially when using native components
Well, that's the point. Users are generally happier with an app that feels native to the platform.
Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter for a new app in 2023?
#96Gonna say something controversial, the future of mobile apps is going to be webviews. It's already the case for desktop. iPhones are getting cpus that are close to desktop CPUs from 5 years ago and they can run 3d games.
there is small issue with webview on android https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=128974...
in my experience build pwa if low budget, build native android and ios if hight budget, development experienct is much nicer with android studio for android and xcode for ios, simple multi page application with vanila js is much nicer for pwa on web
Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter for a new app in 2023?
#97Nothing beats native. 2nd best is what you know. I'm using egui right now for quickly putting together a native cross platform tool. For a startup, again I'd pick what you know. RN and Flutter will provide similar experiences for most apps. Flutter will perform better with charts etc.
I'm a massive egui fan but I don't think you properly compare an immediate mode framework to the retained mode behemoths of Flutter or React Native.
Mobile is ruled out. Some very basic things people take for granted like flex layouts are also incredibly hard to do right.
They have different use cases. That said, I love egui and have built a bunch of in-house tooling with it, such a joy to work with and uses barely any resources despite being immediate mode.
Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter for a new app in 2023?
#98I worked with both. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. Choose what you like more
Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter for a new app in 2023?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate? I've found it a delight.
A heavily nested widget can be a little sore on the eyes. You can break up heavily nested widgets into multiple widgets though. This is also common to JSX though so not sure what the "abominable" comment is referring to.
Yeah it's usually a sign that you're doing too much in a single widget if you end up with a crazy amount of nesting.
Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter for a new app in 2023?
#100Nothing beats native. 2nd best is what you know. I'm using egui right now for quickly putting together a native cross platform tool. For a startup, again I'd pick what you know. RN and Flutter will provide similar experiences for most apps. Flutter will perform better with charts etc.
The problem with native is you need to write everything twice, and that's if you only want to support Android and iOS. Of course you can start by targeting just one platform, but then God forbid people actually like your app, everyone starts asking when it's coming to the other platform and you buckle under the pressure of recoding the same app and somehow avoiding all your technical debt from the first one.
If you have a team with 2+ devs, and maybe some actual users, then go for it. But are there any examples of single developers publishing an app cross platform, written natively for each?