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Flutter looks good, but is painful

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Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#141

Post by seeekr »

krzat wrote: post #137
piokoch wrote: post #131

The question is: if Flutter will not get traction that Google expects, what will happen with the project? The space of multi-platform mobile apps toolkit is already occupied by several well established players (React Native, Qt, Xamarin and a dozen of other more or less popular tools, sometimes well entrenched in their niches, like Unity for games). Flutter comes with rather obscure language and is late in the game,…

The strength of Flutter is it's architecture. Nothing comes close. Web is too slow. Xamarin/React Native is too restricted by native layer. Qt is C++. Popularity of Flutter increases steadily: https://trends.google.pl/trends/explore?cat=31&date=today%20...

Does someone know what the state of the RN rearchitecture effort is? And is there likely going to be a smooth upgrade path forward without much breakage across the ecosystem?

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#142

Post by dejaime »

Even though my experience is basically the same as the author's (8y using java/kotlin toolchain), the article still seems to be written by someone with a hammer frustrated with screws for not working properly. His points can be summed up as "Flutter isn't as stable as the java toolchain that has existed for over a decade" and "I want Flutter to work the way I am used to work".

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#143

Post by jayd16 »

MisterTea wrote: post #84
vijaybritto wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The massive success of Electron apps shows that users don't really care about native controls. Even though electron is terrible in resource usage it enables unmatched development speed for teams. If libui or other libraries can give this experience then most teams won't hesitate using it!

I liken Electron to McDonalds. Gets the job done in a pinch but is awful in every single way. (edit: spelling)

If my app is only as successful as McDonalds, I'll take it.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#144

Post by jinglebells »

krzat wrote: post #137
piokoch wrote: post #131

The question is: if Flutter will not get traction that Google expects, what will happen with the project? The space of multi-platform mobile apps toolkit is already occupied by several well established players (React Native, Qt, Xamarin and a dozen of other more or less popular tools, sometimes well entrenched in their niches, like Unity for games). Flutter comes with rather obscure language and is late in the game,…

The strength of Flutter is it's architecture. Nothing comes close. Web is too slow. Xamarin/React Native is too restricted by native layer. Qt is C++. Popularity of Flutter increases steadily: https://trends.google.pl/trends/explore?cat=31&date=today%20...

Nativescript is more powerful than React Native because it gives you direct access to the JAVA/Objective C libraries if you need it.

I reviewed Flutter but got put off by the levels of abstraction.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#145

Post by projektfu »

jayd16 wrote: post #143
MisterTea wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liken Electron to McDonalds. Gets the job done in a pinch but is awful in every single way. (edit: spelling)

If my app is only as successful as McDonalds, I'll take it.

Electron is successful like McDonalds. McDonalds's customers, not so much?

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#146

Post by jinglebells »

mekkkkkk wrote: post #99

Tip: For anyone trying out Flutter, please remember to evaluate it based on release builds of your app. Scrolling and animations can feel a bit "off" when running the default debug builds. The 60 FPS butter is only really applied when that `--release` flag gets tacked on. Not using Android Studio, so not sure how easy it is to miss the massive performance difference of optimized vs. debug builds in that workflow.

If running in Debug mode means it's running < 60fps I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. Native stuff doesn't do that and React Native/Nativescript don't do that either!

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#147

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

jazoom wrote: post #26
pcr910303 wrote: post #17

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 univ…

>Adding Flutter or any other UI library that draws everything from scratch is a bad idea. Some would say re-writing the same app 5 times (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android) and maintaining 5 codebases is a bad idea.

React Native. Handles everything in your list. Experimentally Linux (via Qt).

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#148

Post by krzat »

jinglebells wrote: post #144
krzat wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strength of Flutter is it's architecture. Nothing comes close. Web is too slow. Xamarin/React Native is too restricted by native layer. Qt is C++. Popularity of Flutter increases steadily: https://trends.google.pl/trends/explore?cat=31&date=today%20...

Nativescript is more powerful than React Native because it gives you direct access to the JAVA/Objective C libraries if you need it. I reviewed Flutter but got put off by the levels of abstraction.

How can you be interested in RN if Flutter is too abstract?

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#149

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

nnq wrote: post #51
pcr910303 wrote: post #17

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 univ…

> Coherent UI is a very important point to users Nah, it ain't. At all! I used to believe it did. That's what we geeks think. And on mobile it doesn't matters for us either - keybings working consistently doesn't matter you're only using touch... Same thing with React Native, everyone thought it's awesome because native UI controls. But users never care about that. For touch UIs it's more user friendly to have you ap…

[citation needed]

All of my experience as a user and developer points me the other way, so I'll need some proof to be convinced.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#150

Post by SkyPuncher »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #47
jazoom wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Adding Flutter or any other UI library that draws everything from scratch is a bad idea. Some would say re-writing the same app 5 times (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android) and maintaining 5 codebases is a bad idea.

IMO it really depends. There's a lot of big companies that have more than enough resources to be able to pay multiple dev teams to build and maintain apps across operating systems. From a few years ago, Twitter and Facebook were famous examples. They pushed so hard to try and build their apps using web technology but kept running into performance issues (thanks to infinite scrolling). After spending fuck knows how mu…

> I just don't understand why they put so much effort into trying to fit a square peg into a round hole instead of just going with native development.

I think in the case of something like Facebook, the sheer complexity of their product drives a need for a singular code base. It would slow their engineering organization to a halt to ensure feature parity with largely seperate code bases.

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