Flutter looks good, but is painful • Hacker News Board

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#11

Post by GeneralTspoon » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:54 AM UTC

desaiguddu wrote: post #7

I am working on 3 Flutter Applications & 2 of them are currently in production. On average we receive 1 major bottleneck a month, which gets resolved with 3rd Party fixes. Happy to help if you are stuck on any issue with Flutter. Our background is native application development, so far this is the best Cross-Platform Development toolkit available. Phonegap, Ionic & others are web wrappers. PLEASE let Flutter grow!

React Native isn't a web wrapper. It uses a Javascript engine to render native iOS/Android components (unlike Flutter, which doesn't use native components, and instead renders everything from scratch).

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#12

Post by hitekker » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:56 AM UTC

Last major discussion and conclusions about Flutter:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19853247

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#13

Post by bsaul » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:58 AM UTC

Does anyone has a link for the market shares of cross-platform mobile development tech ( react native, phonegap, flutter, etc) vs native ? in terms of apps on the stores, for example.

i know they were considered experimental a few years ago but wonder what’s the status today.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#14

Post by desaiguddu » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 7:59 AM UTC

GeneralTspoon wrote: post #11

desaiguddu wrote: post #7

I am working on 3 Flutter Applications & 2 of them are currently in production. On average we receive 1 major bottleneck a month, which gets resolved with 3rd Party fixes. Happy to help if you are stuck on any issue with Flutter. Our background is native application development, so far this is the best Cross-Platform Development toolkit available. Phonegap, Ionic & others are web wrappers. PLEASE let Flutter grow!

React Native isn't a web wrapper. It uses a Javascript engine to render native iOS/Android components (unlike Flutter, which doesn't use native components, and instead renders everything from scratch).

Gotcha! Edited. From my experience found Flutter more reliable & easy to operate compared to React Native.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#15

Post by onetimeaccount1 » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 8:02 AM UTC

desaiguddu wrote: post #7

I am working on 3 Flutter Applications & 2 of them are currently in production. On average we receive 1 major bottleneck a month, which gets resolved with 3rd Party fixes. Happy to help if you are stuck on any issue with Flutter. Our background is native application development, so far this is the best Cross-Platform Development toolkit available. Phonegap, Ionic & others are web wrappers. PLEASE let Flutter grow!

neither is CodenameOne (Java/Kotlin based)

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#16

Post by sgt » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 8:03 AM UTC

latchkey wrote: post #2

I've recently done a bit of Flutter development and have enjoyed it quite a bit. The third party Provider API solves all the state management issues, it should become the default. OP has some valid points for sure, but fact is that any framework is going to have issues. Just part of the game.

That sounds interesting. What would be the go to documentation for a good Provider API implementation (i.e. like a best practice guide with an example)?

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#17

Post by pcr910303 » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 8:05 AM UTC

While this has little relationship to the original article... We really should be trying to use the native GUI toolkit (or cross-platform native UI libraries like libui), not using Flutter-esque libraries that draws everything from scratch.

Coherent UI is a very important point to users IMO. Users can assume that some special feature from App X will also work on App Y.

For example, in macOS Cocoa, textboxes have universal readline-esque keybindings (and is configurable globally) which, as an Emacs user, very, very useful.

Most Mac apps use Cocoa as the GUI toolkit, so basically all kinds of apps can benefit these keybindings.

Another example of this directly benefiting users is the addition of tabs in macOS Sierra.

macOS Sierra added tabs to Cocoa apps, and applications could get the feature without additional modification. I can use tabs in any application, with the same look-and-feel, in all apps.

Stories like these are mostly only macOS; since Windows apps usually just re-invent all kinds of UI elements, while Linux's GUI toolkits are super-fragmented. (GTK vs Qt is one thing, and there are lots of other options!)

Adding Flutter or any other UI library that draws everything from scratch is a bad idea.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#18

Post by dep_b » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 8:05 AM UTC

I liked the way the UI was built in Flutter and of course Dart > vanilla JS. But with SwiftUI and Jet Pack around the corner there's a bit less appeal, especially since Kotlin & Swift > Dart and a lot of UX niceties come for free in iOS, like rotation / resizing or hiding the keyboard while scrolling.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#19

Post by KhoomeiK » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 8:06 AM UTC

desaiguddu wrote: post #14

GeneralTspoon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React Native isn't a web wrapper. It uses a Javascript engine to render native iOS/Android components (unlike Flutter, which doesn't use native components, and instead renders everything from scratch).

Gotcha! Edited. From my experience found Flutter more reliable & easy to operate compared to React Native.

I think this is mostly just a preference thing and may have to do whether you're coming from a React vs Native Mobile background. As a React developer, React Native was really amazing for me and made perfect sense. Flutter on the other hand, not so much.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#20

Post by pictur » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 8:09 AM UTC

GeneralTspoon wrote: post #11

desaiguddu wrote: post #7

I am working on 3 Flutter Applications & 2 of them are currently in production. On average we receive 1 major bottleneck a month, which gets resolved with 3rd Party fixes. Happy to help if you are stuck on any issue with Flutter. Our background is native application development, so far this is the best Cross-Platform Development toolkit available. Phonegap, Ionic & others are web wrappers. PLEASE let Flutter grow!

React Native isn't a web wrapper. It uses a Javascript engine to render native iOS/Android components (unlike Flutter, which doesn't use native components, and instead renders everything from scratch).

react native is a big bullshit