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Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

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Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

#11

Post by discreteevent »

yawn wrote: post #2

> So Flutter is actually pushing pixels itself, sounds strange, but it works The siren song of cross-platform development sounds so sweet to the ears and I've fallen for it quite a few times only to get bitten in the end. Introducing another layer between you and the source has several drawbacks: it's an additional source for bugs, it makes you reliant on the middle man to be timely with updates to keep pace of the n…

Fair points. It's worth stating though that this only matters if you have a requirement to look 100% native. Many apps don't have this requirement whether mobile or desktop and so they may use a web ui. In our case we didn't have the 100% native requirement and used Qt. We still had a really slick user interface, it just wasn't native.

Note that our customers are primarily concerned about the functionality of the app: They are not drive by consumers, they come to the application because of it's functionality. I understand that not everyone has this kind of customer.

Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

#12

Post by MarkMc »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #3
yawn wrote: post #2

> So Flutter is actually pushing pixels itself, sounds strange, but it works The siren song of cross-platform development sounds so sweet to the ears and I've fallen for it quite a few times only to get bitten in the end. Introducing another layer between you and the source has several drawbacks: it's an additional source for bugs, it makes you reliant on the middle man to be timely with updates to keep pace of the n…

Yeah, been there, done that. The problem with building your own UI toolkit is that you can never make it feel native. You can get 90% there, but it always feels a bit off to the user. The more you make things look like native controls, the more users expect them to act like native controls and tiny differences get amplified.

I'm not sure 100% fidelity to native look and feel is so important to users, as long as the UI is fast, responsive and looks good. Spotify doesn't seem to have a problem with users despite its garish black and green appearance.

Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

#13

Post by MarkMc »

If you have an Android phone, a good demonstration of flutter is the gallery app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.flutter.gal...

There doesn't seem to be an equivalent iOS app, which is kind of strange for a product whose whole purpose is cross platform development. But maybe it's not allowed on the App Store because it's alpha or just a demo.

Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

#14

Post by sethladd »

yawn wrote: post #2

> So Flutter is actually pushing pixels itself, sounds strange, but it works The siren song of cross-platform development sounds so sweet to the ears and I've fallen for it quite a few times only to get bitten in the end. Introducing another layer between you and the source has several drawbacks: it's an additional source for bugs, it makes you reliant on the middle man to be timely with updates to keep pace of the n…

(disclaimer: I work on the Flutter team)

> What do I see when I'm running an older native version?

You will see exactly the pixels that your designer intended and your developer coded. :) Apps built with Flutter ship the renderer and framework inside the app, which helps ensure consistency and fidelity across devices, OEMs, OS, and platform. This is particularly important for brands that want a brand-first design delivered consistently to all their users. Hope that helps!

Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

#15

Post by roughike »

As a native mobile developer of several years, I've always been somewhat skeptical of the various cross-platform solutions that have emerged over the years.

The WebView-based solutions weren't fast enough and sometimes behaved differently across devices because of different WebView versions. With React Native, the impression was far better because the performance actually can be quite good. But it's still hard to abstract the UI layer away when even the native Views on Android behave differently across devices and Android versions. I had to use almost a half of a day for fixing invisible drop-down menu items on some specific Samsung device on Android 4.1.2. Not to mention when you have to abstract the UI for both Android & iOS, which brings its own set of problems. It's one of the reasons why such a fundamental thing as navigation has been so hard to get right.

I feel Flutter is the first cross-platform SDK that gets something fundamentally right. Since every pixel on the UI is rendered by the framework, we as developers have better control of everything. It's going to have much better performance because there are no bridges between native and cross-platform land. Additionally, Samsung can't fuck up our UIs: once the UI works, it works the same on every device.

As a bonus, they also keep tremendous care of their codebase and they have the best documentation I've ever seen. My really simple, quick 4-line fix didn't go through until I wrote 30 lines of automated tests to go with it. After all, Flutter is going to be the native SDK for developing apps for Fuchsia, and I think Google has learned not to repeat the same mistakes that happened with Android again.

Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

#16

Post by matt2000 »

bsaul wrote: post #7
yawn wrote: post #2

> So Flutter is actually pushing pixels itself, sounds strange, but it works The siren song of cross-platform development sounds so sweet to the ears and I've fallen for it quite a few times only to get bitten in the end. Introducing another layer between you and the source has several drawbacks: it's an additional source for bugs, it makes you reliant on the middle man to be timely with updates to keep pace of the n…

Another issue is when your customer (or boss) ask you for this very simple feature that's found everywhere ( because it's a native sdk feature) and you suddenly realize you'll have the spend days if not weeks implementing it. I wouldn't be surprised if maps weren't as powerful in flutter as in native android or ios sdk for a long time. Still, i think the "low level / pixel level" approach that flutter took is the onl…

I’ve been writing a new project in Flutter and so far it’s been dramatically faster than writing an app with either of the native SDKs. The issue you mention here is the key downside though. For example, as far as I know there is no map component or video player. I don’t happen to need those, but if you did it’d be a deal breaker probably.

Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

#17

Post by bitwize »

No.

You use native UI widgets or you gtfo. This may seem strange to us Linux folks, who are used to making do with any old UI. But Apple users are UI supertasters. If anything is a tiny bit off -- a bounding box one pixel too short, a response to button click one millisecond too laggy -- Apple users will notice, and Apple users will complain, and it will be reflected in your app's sales/metrics.

At least on iOS, it's worth it to use the native widgets.

Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

#18

Post by discreteevent »

roughike wrote: post #15

As a native mobile developer of several years, I've always been somewhat skeptical of the various cross-platform solutions that have emerged over the years. The WebView-based solutions weren't fast enough and sometimes behaved differently across devices because of different WebView versions. With React Native, the impression was far better because the performance actually can be quite good. But it's still hard to abs…

In fairness Qt also gets this right: It renders every pixel and it has a fast rendering architecture. Having used Qt, flutter is very attractive to me for the case where you have to work with a team. It can be hard to get together enough people nowadays who will want to work with even a little C++. The Qt libraries make it very easy IMO (most stuff is ref counted) but not everyone is going to buy that.

Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

#19

Post by Numberwang »

sethladd wrote: post #14
yawn wrote: post #2

> So Flutter is actually pushing pixels itself, sounds strange, but it works The siren song of cross-platform development sounds so sweet to the ears and I've fallen for it quite a few times only to get bitten in the end. Introducing another layer between you and the source has several drawbacks: it's an additional source for bugs, it makes you reliant on the middle man to be timely with updates to keep pace of the n…

(disclaimer: I work on the Flutter team) > What do I see when I'm running an older native version? You will see exactly the pixels that your designer intended and your developer coded. :) Apps built with Flutter ship the renderer and framework inside the app, which helps ensure consistency and fidelity across devices, OEMs, OS, and platform. This is particularly important for brands that want a brand-first design del…

Thank you for replying in this thread.

Another question. Why is there no desktop support?

Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

#20

Post by mherrmann »

discreteevent wrote: post #18
roughike wrote: post #15

As a native mobile developer of several years, I've always been somewhat skeptical of the various cross-platform solutions that have emerged over the years. The WebView-based solutions weren't fast enough and sometimes behaved differently across devices because of different WebView versions. With React Native, the impression was far better because the performance actually can be quite good. But it's still hard to abs…

In fairness Qt also gets this right: It renders every pixel and it has a fast rendering architecture. Having used Qt, flutter is very attractive to me for the case where you have to work with a team. It can be hard to get together enough people nowadays who will want to work with even a little C++. The Qt libraries make it very easy IMO (most stuff is ref counted) but not everyone is going to buy that.

I use the PyQt Python bindings to Qt for exactly that reason(?) It works very well for my file manager [1].

[1]: https://fman.io

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