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

Counterpoint, I made a recent shift to Android from many many years of iOS development. It's not the language that I struggled with, it was the completely different engineering culture surrounding the platform. Yes there are many similarities, things like concerns for battery life and thoughtful network usage. However, that's where the similarities end. The APIs and appropriate architecture decisions are completely different, so I needed to build all new instincts.

Then, you have the tooling that are completely different. Where it would normally take me 5 min to jump into Xcode to profile an application, inspect for leaks or other performance issues, I spent a few hours going through Android documentation learning how to do the same thing.

Last, and this one is a bit nuanced and sort of hard to explain. As a senior engineer, you're typically expected to help mentor others and maintain the foundations of your product so that as new people join they have a template to work from. If you're switching to something so different, you could end up hurting the team (or company) by using the wrong patterns and promoting incompatible ideas. People need to trust you and if you break that trust at the beginning of your employment, it'll be really hard to earn it back.

No regrets though, and I'm grateful to my employer for giving me the space to make the shift. However, I do not believe in the idea you can hire someone at a generalist level and then expect them to be productive anytime soon.

There is a saying, "Jack of All Trades, Master of None," and although very cynical, it's just an honest statement when it comes to these things. Hire the right person for the role you need filled first, then if you want to make room for engineers who are looking for big career changes, make sure your product and team won't suffer for that and you have the right culture in place to encourage that kind of growth.

The last time I developed in Ionic, I stumbled into problems when actually trying to DO things in the mobile platforms: Want to use the camera? you are limited to whatever "plugin" is available. Want to read from SSD ? you also have to integrate some plugin and pray that it works for your use case.

To me, it feels that Ionic is only good for the "minimum common denominator" of apps (a webpage, maaaybe with some storage), but once you move a bit from that path, you struggle a lot with half-baked plugins and "black boxes".

Oh, and the documentation... both for Ionic (which? cordova o capacitor?) and the plugins, it is SO bad. Also, the fact that Ionic is actually a for profit endeavour, and you will pretty soon hit a wall that you only can remove by paying.

I don't understand: I am using Flutter just fine from vim and I have never even tried their IDEs. What do you mean by "disable"? What "bloatware" were you forced to install in the first place, and how is it running?

For me, Flutter & Dart were badly needed solutions to the traditional way of developing Android apps. There's really no need to do the "native app dance" anymore, it's costly unless you really want to target a specific Android device.

Having said this the article does bring up an important issue, in particular, it's tougher to find Dart developers and you would most likely need to spend 6~8 months for a new team to get into the groove...BUT

React Native is a giant mess. It's clunky and slow and throwing Javascript/Typescript at everything has been problematic and it's clear that the performance lags behind Flutter by a large factor.

If I had to choose, I would take on the tool that offers the best development experience and a large chunk of that comes from the debugging, and it just so happens Google hit the nail——NullPointerException is one of THE biggest risks of using other toolsets.

So If I had to bet here, I would put it on Flutter/Dart. It is essentially a love child of ES6/Java/Typescript and it just hits so many pain points coming from React Native.

I really do think React will become the Java Swing of our generation, yes you've done everything right but it seems you need to keep up with new trends and the usage of hooks is really annoying and unintuitive.

In fact, here on the web front, I think Backend-as-Frontend where we persist application state in websocket will be a game changer. On the mobile front, Flutter clearly scratches the itch for both newcomers, react native developers but also backend-as-frontend really gets rid of the need to maintain two separate code bases (one for react and the other for backend).

I think a web app that loads via Backend-as-Frontend framework that Flutter talks to like a regular joe REST API will be the paradigm shift.

I would love to hear what others think of my views as I'm curious as to how my bets will pay off.

Many people would consider some of the ones you ruled out as "garbage" as great, while considering React/Vue/Angular as garbage.

React is the clear winner in terms of market penetration as that is what happens to projects with the largest marketing budgets / corporate hype.