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Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

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Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#21

Don't miss the link at the bottom of the article to CPU utilization numbers. tl;dr: Flutter and React Native are dramatically easier to develop for than native toolkits and Flutter CPU utilization is better than native toolkits. That... is not what I was expecting.

With native toolkits being around for so long, why do they still suck to build with?

Because they carry around 10+ versions of compatibility debt

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#22
There are some issues here and there (JSX is not a language!) but this is definitely a very good comparison. It is indeed a little bit too shallow (give animations! Full app navigation stack management!) but gives practical insights.

Props to the author.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#23
I think it would be an interesting experiment to have people with more expertise in each platform/tech write the code and then measure the developer time and performance.

This is because, based on what the author mentioned about cell reuse, they barely have any expertise in iOS. It would be hard to trust the code. Perhaps the author has provided access to the code?

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#25
I've been considering trying out Flutter, but mainly due to my frustrations with React Native and I'm not entirely sure if others have had similar experiences or if Flutter would be any better. I have all kinds of issues with React Native tooling stability: code randomly reverts back to previous versions with hot reloading, things only partially update when I make changes, the same styles sometimes have inconsistent behavior, Flex doesn't always work the way that it should (justify-content is sometimes simply ignored for example) and things that should look the same on iOS and Android sometimes don't. So I guess my questions to those reading this are: 1. Have you had similar experiences using React Native? 2. Have you had these kinds of problems using Flutter as well?

I'm seriously considering rebuilding a prototype we have at work in Flutter in my spare time but I'd hate for it to be a similar situation to React Native where it appears to save me time at first and then fucks me over and only makes everything take more effort to get right.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#26

ouch The Android code indeed looks like a copy paste of bad stack overflow answers. I can't really hold it against the author .. learning several platforms at the same time is a bit much.

Could you elaborate, or do you know of a better example of an idiomatic kotlin Android app?

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#28
Looking at Flutter vs React Native, the only comparison of interest for, perhaps most of us, Flutter for the win! Lower dev resources and way lower cpu usage. Dart is lovely, the docs are great, wide array of great UI widgets, and easy animation. As for hot reloading, well, you just have to experience the difference.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#29
If you’re a small startup, just like we are doing at ours [1], you want to share as much code as possible between your web and mobile apps, and also backend, so sadly due to Dart, I don’t see us anywhere in the future using Flutter.

[1] https://standups.io

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#30

Looking at Flutter vs React Native, the only comparison of interest for, perhaps most of us, Flutter for the win! Lower dev resources and way lower cpu usage. Dart is lovely, the docs are great, wide array of great UI widgets, and easy animation. As for hot reloading, well, you just have to experience the difference.

> Lower dev resources

Learning a completely new language in Dart to even get started with Flutter doesn't seem like low dev resources.

With React Native you are using:

- Javascript which most devs have a grasp on in 2020

- JSX which really isn't much different to HTML

- Styling is practically just CSS with slightly different property formatting and naming

If you've decided to go down the RN then theres a decent chance that your devs have used React before and there really isn't much between React and RN.

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