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Flutter 3

docs.flutter.dev

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Re: Flutter 3

#241

Post by booi »

hunterb123 wrote: post #156
the_duke wrote: post #42

Despite many maturity issues in practice Flutter is the only realistic option for true cross platform UIs that run everywhere. Apart from Qt , but the licensing issue is a hindrance. And yes, the web backend isn't ideal, but it will improve over time. I just wish Google had built Flutter on a low level core that isn't tied to Dart, so it would be usable from other languages. Dart isn't horrible and is getting better,…

I disagree, Flutter is probably the worst choice. React Native is the all around best choice for targeting all platforms natively, otherwise use pure web tech (Ionic + Electron) The desktop and web targets for Flutter are laughable in their current state. Completely unusable so I consider Flutter to be a mobile only platform at this time. Another downside is Flutter's emulated UI, it doesn't bridge to native controls…

Don't forget native targets for TVs (well android TV at least)

Re: Flutter 3

#242

Post by scarface74 »

mhoad wrote: post #237
scarface74 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn’t think it’s own cross platform framework is good enough for its own applications https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/

This wasn’t anything to do with Futter for the record and they even called it out in a quote saying that they continue to recommend Flutter in that article.

They continue to recommend it for other developers. But it isn’t good enough for them?

And typical Google

> As part of this shift, Google in July put Material’s iOS libraries in “maintenance mode.”

Who is to say Flutter isn’t next? Google has the attention span of a coked up teenager.

Re: Flutter 3

#243

Post by criddell »

SergeAx wrote: post #86
criddell wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flutter is the only realistic option for true cross platform UIs that run everywhere. Do you really want cross platform everywhere ? You might want it but what you inevitably get is something that is huge and just okay everywhere instead of something truly great anywhere. Is that a trade off you are happy with as a user? That said, I do happily use a couple of cross platform applications. PyCharm and SublimeText wh…

We really want cross platform on Android and iOS. Windows and MacOS are nice to have, why not?

Who is “we”? As a user I want highly polished, efficient apps. That pretty much rules out anything built with a cross platform toolkit. (Games are a major exception.)

As a developer, I personally want to make those kinds of programs too. I periodically check into the state of the cross platform toolkits and frankly they really aren’t any better than they were a decade ago.

Separating out a UI layer that is unique in each platform helps and writing with native toolkits helps, but there are still fundamental differences that you can’t really abstract away.

I think the biggest market for these toolkits is in enterprise software. There, lowering development costs seems to be more important than anything else.

Re: Flutter 3

#244

Post by Rapzid »

Can Flutter/Dart dynamically load code yet for apps that need plugins?

Love the concept but eyeing it for b2b style apps that need extensibility.

Re: Flutter 3

#245

Post by bschwindHN »

People are talking about a better developer experience, but hardly anyone is talking about the user experience with apps built with this tech.

I don't feel it's great, especially on older devices. Take google pay, a showcase flutter app. It's a laggy mess on an iPhone SE 2016, whereas the "old" google pay ran perfectly fine. On top of that, many google apps I use these days will just freeze and stop accepting touch inputs. I have no idea if it's all flutter, or just the weird stuff google does on mobile platforms, but other apps don't suffer from this.

I think flutter is good for a resource-scarce team trying to create mobile apps for multiple platforms, but otherwise it creates an inferior end product compared to a native app (let's please not get into the definition of "native", for iOS and Android you know what I mean). For google, who has enormous developer resources, I'm not sure why they would ever use it themselves unless it's for apps they don't care about.

https://flutter.dev/showcase/google-pay

Re: Flutter 3

#246

Post by the_duke »

NonNefarious wrote: post #214
the_duke wrote: post #42

Despite many maturity issues in practice Flutter is the only realistic option for true cross platform UIs that run everywhere. Apart from Qt , but the licensing issue is a hindrance. And yes, the web backend isn't ideal, but it will improve over time. I just wish Google had built Flutter on a low level core that isn't tied to Dart, so it would be usable from other languages. Dart isn't horrible and is getting better,…

"I just wish Google had built Flutter on a low level core that isn't tied to Dart, so it would be usable from other languages." Exactly. Dart is a deal-breaker. I was tasked with choosing a cross-platform development solution, and rejected Flutter because nobody at my company (including me) knows Dart or has time to learn it. Nor would any contractors we were likely to find know it. After quite a bit of research on o…

To be fair: Dart is relatively straight forward and simple to learn.

You should have decently qualified developers be productive within a week.

But forcing a new language on people usually doesn't go well.

Re: Flutter 3

#247

Post by yesimahuman »

danielvaughn wrote: post #230
yesimahuman wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's how Ionic developers would describe it today. Have you actually used it or Capacitor recently? The quality of apps being built on the platform has never been higher. (one random example: https://reflect.app )

I have been working with it recently, yes. Again, I'm not criticizing their tech, moreso the underlying idea - rendering a webview as if it's a native app.

Seeing the quality of apps coming from the community especially with the latest updates in Ionic 6, I can’t agree with your framing at all. The team is highly receptive to specific feedback if you have anything we should improve or GitHub links

Re: Flutter 3

#249

Post by the_duke »

hunterb123 wrote: post #156
the_duke wrote: post #42

Despite many maturity issues in practice Flutter is the only realistic option for true cross platform UIs that run everywhere. Apart from Qt , but the licensing issue is a hindrance. And yes, the web backend isn't ideal, but it will improve over time. I just wish Google had built Flutter on a low level core that isn't tied to Dart, so it would be usable from other languages. Dart isn't horrible and is getting better,…

I disagree, Flutter is probably the worst choice. React Native is the all around best choice for targeting all platforms natively, otherwise use pure web tech (Ionic + Electron) The desktop and web targets for Flutter are laughable in their current state. Completely unusable so I consider Flutter to be a mobile only platform at this time. Another downside is Flutter's emulated UI, it doesn't bridge to native controls…

Every experience I had with React Native was truly horrible.

Gigantic, messy JS dependency tree. Constant build breakages after minor version updates. Random flakiness. Unmaintained or buggy native plugins. Questionable support for issues that didn't affect FB.

I wouldn't touch it again.

Re: Flutter 3

#250

Post by gnat »

munificent wrote: post #198
clumsysmurf wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was enjoying the frog book (The Dart Programming Language, Gilad Bracha & Erik Meiker) but that was 2015, and now very out of date. Its strange to see there is no up to date book from major publisher, like the Rust book at https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

The incentive structures around technical books are pretty weird. Most major publishers pay quite small royalty rates, so even a popular tech book won't actually make the author much money. And the effort to write a good technical book is pretty huge. Also, the set of people who will actually finish writing a book is quite a bit smaller than the set of people who aspire to. (An editor at O'Reilly told me once that on…

Former O'Reilly editor here: story checks out. The 1/3 might be a bit low -- I had some surprises (one guy joined the Peace Corps and moved to South America, plus usual divorces and deaths and job changes) but it felt more like 80% completed. This might be the rosy glasses of memory, though.

There's also a weird difference in incentive between writing the first edition and working on updates: if the author was just after "I wrote a book!" then they already have that, and won't be so interested in updating.

If they were made famous and now have a lot of work as a result of the first book, they may not have time for it. It's quite the delicate dance to get someone else to update the book: without the update, sales will drop, but 1st edition authors feel weird giving a lot of their (not sizable) royalties to someone who didn't write most of the text.

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