Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by verttii » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 3:56 AM UTC

arciini wrote: post #4

I think building a toy app for yourself is among the best ways to decide for yourself which framework to go with! The conclusions from the article were: > Creating the Flutter application only took approximately ⅓ of the time it took to create both native applications combined. This proves how much time you save by using cross-platform frameworks. Their Hot Reload functionality also sped up the development cycle a lo…

My experience with Flutter is that you need a lot less native code than you do with React Native.

However, the hands down best part is the tooling. Unlike on react native everything just works on Flutter. It doesn't feel nearly as fragile.

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

#72

Post by jrs95 » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 4:57 AM UTC

dickjocke wrote: post #48

jrs95 wrote: post #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…

Please, please try Flutter. I had literally the same issues with React Native and gave Flutter a test run late last year. I will never go back. Flutter is so stable and honestly my frustrations with Flex made consider giving up on mobile development. I think as a backend dev i really struggle with the layout aspects of mobile dev and flutter makes it so easy for me. I'd say spend two nights playing with flutter. It t…

Exactly what I was hoping to hear, I'll get started with it this weekend :)

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

#73

Post by tessting » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:00 AM UTC

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #60

I'm really interested in learning Flutter for future app development as I could really use the time saved in development. But, one thing which really concerns me is the volatility of Google w.r.t products which doesn't get enough adoption i.e. in other words 'I'm afraid Google will kill Flutter'.

I know this happened with Angular 1, but I am curious why I never hear this sentiment for GoLang which people seem nuts for. Is it because Google is responsible for maintaining the actual UI Widgets in this case?

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

#74

Post by ink404 » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:05 AM UTC

crowbahr wrote: post #52

Benjammer wrote: post #42

This is super interesting, but the problem I have is that this guy's eye for design leaves a lot to be desired. When was the last time someone built a clunky table directly into the UI and added fully styled table rows dynamically? Why not modernize the design, and use a styled list view with a data adapter and try this again on each platform? It didn't surprise me at all that he struggled with the table in basically…

As an Android developer I looked at the code he wrote and felt bad for him. Of course it was painful trying to set all your styling up programmatically for the table! Use a viewholder pattern and a recyclerview/adapter then throw your data into the adapter. Make a simple xml file for your rows and inflate those into the viewholder then you're good to go! None of these clumsy declarative attempts to do what xml does w…

Hi, slightly unrelated to the thread, but do you have any resources you can recommend for modern Android UI development? (besides the basic google resources/ codelabs...etc)

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

#75

Post by deltron3030 » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:10 AM UTC

Townley wrote: post #5

Another factor when evaluating platforms to build an app with includes ease of initial submission/submission of updates. I've never used Xamarind or flutter, but easily one of the best parts of using Expo (React-Native) was their built-in certificate management, guidance through the submission process, and eventually immediate publication of updates through running `expo publish` My client was pleasantly speechless w…

Isn't there the danger that Apple just forbids/bans this remote code reloading/replacement to protect their users? I mean it's a loophole that can get abused (and likely is) for stuff that wouldn't make it through the review process in first place..

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

#76

Post by arielm » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:15 AM UTC

virtualwhys wrote: post #65

arielm wrote: post #62

Ultimately it’s hard to evaluate using a single simplistic app. It’s not a matter of setting up a better evaluation but rather real life. A different way to look at this is adoption, and flutter isn’t at all popular. I don’t believe that’s only a matter of visibility. React Native is the 5th and Xamarin is the 7th most used frameworks for iOS while flutter is 15th, and similarly among Android apps where it’s 10th. So…

By some measures Flutter is taking off [1], and it's Github repo has certainly drawn some interest [2]. At any rate, Flutter is far from unpopular, and is iirc the youngest of any of the competing frameworks. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fg%2F11f03_rzbg... [2] https://github.com/flutter/flutter

It’s really interesting to see so much interest in flutter is coming from China. But keep in mind, that’s search traffic not apps using flutter.

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

#77

Post by crowbahr » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:26 AM UTC

ink404 wrote: post #74

crowbahr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Android developer I looked at the code he wrote and felt bad for him. Of course it was painful trying to set all your styling up programmatically for the table! Use a viewholder pattern and a recyclerview/adapter then throw your data into the adapter. Make a simple xml file for your rows and inflate those into the viewholder then you're good to go! None of these clumsy declarative attempts to do what xml does w…

Hi, slightly unrelated to the thread, but do you have any resources you can recommend for modern Android UI development? (besides the basic google resources/ codelabs...etc)

Unfortunately I cannot. I've mostly taught myself by reading exactly those same specs you're talking about and watching a lot of YouTube.

I know I'm a thoroughly inadequate Android developer because I've only ever worked on a small team at a small company and have had 0 tutelage, but what I've taught myself in the past 3 years boils down to:

Libraries to use: Retrofit, RxJava, Dagger2, Room

Use AndroidX over support/compat whenever you can.

Kotlin is amazing, though I'm still learning. If you know Java then Kotlin makes a lot of sense.

Use constraint layouts so that when you try to dabble with AndroidX motion layouts you'll have an easier time.

MVVM is commonly accepted architecture, and I like it personally.

Use single activity architecture: 1 activity with many fragments is the industry standard (or it should be). Some exceptions exist but mostly that's how it works.

XML files are your friends and editing them directly is faster and often easier than the Visual Builder in Android Studio.

Be sure that when you install the emulator you have it integrating with HAXM or HyperV or whatever they have it integrate with these days: it'll make debugging on the emu a lot less painful.

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

#78

Post by lazyjones » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:29 AM UTC

That's some admirable persistence by the author... I gave up on Flutter (for now) right after installing, having to accept (and supposedly read first) about 10 licenses during the process and then failing to start basically the default app in the Android emulator with obscure error messages. What a terrible UX developers have to put up with these days... At least it was funny to let Android Studio analyze the code (the default app), yielding these:

  FlutterBinaryMessenger.h
  Typo: In word 'FLUTTERBINARYMESSENGER'
  Typo: In word 'Implementated'
  Typo: In word 'commuication'

Doesn't look like people actually use all these features much.

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

#79

Post by hardwaresofton » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:39 AM UTC

eerrt wrote: post #39

Was hoping to see a comparison with https://www.nativescript.org/

This needs to be higher up -- Nativescript is Flutter's biggest competition and IMO it's better than Flutter, because it doesn't require investing in Dart and switching to the Flutter "ecosystem" completely.

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

#80

Post by agumonkey » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 5:40 AM UTC

throwno wrote: post #69

papito wrote: post #67

Considering that the lifespan of a Google product is 4 years, would you really invest the time to become an expert on Flutter? Right now about 190 Google products are slated for retirement. They are even going to start killing the Google Cloud after 2023. It's a YUUGE bet.

Also, do you really want to invest time into learning Dart?

I don't trust dart to exist long, but some ideas in it were worth reading about