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Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

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Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#81

Post by BoorishBears »

mrtksn wrote: post #60
wiradikusuma wrote: post #5

I think Flutter is better _because_ it uses Dart. I used to hate that decision ("Not another language to learn.."), but Flutter and Dart are like Mac and macOS (I'm aware people complaining about macOS quality going down the hill.. but that's another story). They're both from the same company, seemingly built for each other, and the language (Dart) improvements are _relevant_ for the platform (Flutter). Flutter still…

>Flutter still has its quirks, but hands down, it's the best platform for the majority of "standard" apps How is the market for "standard" apps doing? One would think that by now "UI for a Database/API" should have died out already? Even if companies do need an UI for a DB or an API, that job must have had become really simple with all the frameworks and libraries. On Twitter I keep seeing people building the million…

The basic UI is the easy part.

Established companies have established company problems, complex flows that need to account for things like legacy deep links, A/B testing, UIs that go off the beaten path for brand identity, etc.

It all adds up to very little of a common denominator for all of these apps.

I've worked on some of the top apps in the play store for their respective categories, and if you saw their codebases your first thought would be "I could recreate this app in 1/10th this much code!".

After actually talking to all the stakeholders involved your second thought would be "I'm amazed this didn't take 10x the code!"

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#82

Post by klodolph »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #57
klodolph wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dart is also surprisingly nice, in a lot of ways. I don't want to get down too much into the details because much of language design is subjective. I found it very easy to work with because it has a lot of the edges sanded off, relative to JavaScript. The developer experience is pretty good.

One of the things that always surprises me about Dart is that Google continued to invest in it for so long without any real returns until fairly recently. Dart came out in 2012 and to my knowledge had basically no usage for several years. Flutter came out in 2017, and then it took a decent amount of time to start picking up steam. Very uncharacteristic of Google to invest in something like Dart for 7+ years before it…

There are various theories along the lines of "principal engineer retention strategy", where part of the reason for these projects (and I have to emphasize "part" in "part of the reason") is because they are the pet projects of some particular individual at Google who can deliver tons of value to the company other ways, and who might leave if they don't get to work on their pet projects.

I have definitely heard stories of people at companies like Google and Facebook who have done things in their career that saved or made the company enormous amounts of money in one fell swoop, people who can help get massive projects back on track or solve thorny resource usage problems. The theory is that if they've done it a couple times in the past, you do what it takes to keep them around because they'll probably do it again in the future.

These people generally get positions crafted for them, and sometimes teams.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#83

Post by geodel »

I think it is all fine. People who seek personal and/or professional growth would learn new tech stacks and apply interesting ways. A lot of people who would rather stay on current stack and take technology as something that just pay bills is also good choice.

It is only the incessant talk that try to prove past/present choice of technology as "objectively better" seems unnecessary to me.

This also reminds when Sun certified Java developer was the way to hire Java developers. With so many people got this certificate, it became so bad that it was more likely that Sun certified developer would be worse as they put all effort in getting certificate and not really learning programing.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#84

Post by mwattsun »

klodolph wrote: post #53
mwattsun wrote: post #7

I've programmed a lot in both Dart and C# and my take is that Microsoft looked at Java and decided they needed a Java-like language like so they made C#. Google was into Java but Oracle sued them over it so they decided they needed a Java-like language so made Dart. Edit: Dart is ridiculously easy to learn because it's very familiar so if someone complains about having to learn Dart it means they don't want to learn…

I don't have inside information here. My reading of the narrative is that Dart was created originally as an alternative to JavaScript, because JavaScript did (and does) have just tons of problems all around. It pivoted from being primarily a JavaScript alternative to supporting use-cases like Flutter.

If you're curious, this is an informative video of a debate between the designer of TypeScript and the designer of the Dart VM about which was the better approach.

Anders Hejlsberg and Lars Bak: TypeScript, JavaScript, and Dart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqbCQuK0gM

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#85

Post by ishaanbahal »

GranPC wrote: post #49
akmarinov wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you testing on an iPhone? They had a big issue on iPhones that they fixed a couple of months back. Flutter is a very Android first framework, for obvious reasons.

Nope, mid-to-high range Android phone from mid-2017. Haven't tried Flutter on iOS at all.

I started writing flutter apps in their RC1, and since then up till last year (since then I haven't written flutter), flutter had scrolling frame drops on both iOS and Android (high and low end). It was unrelated to device, and happened always when using the listview builder. It may have been fixed now, but it was an issue for a long while. And it also plagued web (hummingbird then).

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#86

Post by claytongulick »

samwillis wrote: post #37

I want to throw Ionic and Capacitor (or any other webview based toolkit with your favourite SPA framework) into this mix, I believe for a lot of apps its probably a better option than either Flutter or React Native. I also don't and believe in "one true cross platform toolkit", each has its place. So: Hiring - The OP suggests React Native has a larger pool of developers than Flutter, very true. But Ionic/Capacitor/et…

There's an additional advantage, which is that you have a straightforward eject path from app stores.

If Apple or Google decides to boot you off the store for whatever reason, you're not out of business, you can distribute as a PWA and never really notice.

For many LOB apps, discoverability via the app store isn't relevant at all.

My primary app distribution mechanism is a SMS message with a link to a PWA that installs to home screen. Works everywhere, on every platform, which is a huge advantage for my senior population users.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#87

Post by brabel »

amelius wrote: post #30
wiradikusuma wrote: post #5

I think Flutter is better _because_ it uses Dart. I used to hate that decision ("Not another language to learn.."), but Flutter and Dart are like Mac and macOS (I'm aware people complaining about macOS quality going down the hill.. but that's another story). They're both from the same company, seemingly built for each other, and the language (Dart) improvements are _relevant_ for the platform (Flutter). Flutter still…

As someone who started programming using GCC, Vi and commandline tools, I just hate the tooling around Flutter. And yes, someone will probably point out that I can use Flutter with commandline tools after I disable all the bloatware that needs to be installed anyway, but that's missing the point.

> but that's missing the point.

How is pointing out that you don't need the tools you hate and you can use the same kind of tools in the CLI as you would with any other framework missing the point?

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#89

Post by claytongulick »

alexashka wrote: post #65

If you're smart enough to learn Flutter, you're smart enough to learn Swift/Kotlin. So, just do that. The appeal of React Native is that you get to stay in the javascript ecosystem. If you're going to move away, move away to native. It's a no brainer. The very premise of these cross platform tools is flawed, frankly - if you can't afford one dev per platform - your problem isn't tooling, it's money. So, just fix the…

> So, just fix the money issue.

Have you ever actually had to run a startup?

I'm not trying to attack you, but this comment comes across to me as incredibly disconnected.

> I don't even bother applying

I'm glad for you that our industry has such high demand that you have these options.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#90

Post by travisgriggs »

I've played with Flutter a little. It was OK.

I develop/maintain 2x2 native apps (two different apps, with 2 different native versions each). When I started this years ago, the cross platform stories weren't as prevalent, and we needed really strong BLE integration (not just a casual shim library). So we did the native thing.

Reading various forums, it almost feels like no one does the iOS/Android native app dance anymore. Is that a vocal minority or is that what's really going on? Or are there still reasons to do native (Kotlin/Swift) apps?

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