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Flutter looks good, but is painful

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Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#21

Post by gitgud »

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).

Because Flutter has it's own rendering engine, it's inherently more consistent in refresh rates and UI components.

Although React Native shows Native elements, they vary slightly across different; devices, platforms, OS's etc.. this can create many weird edge cases, which makes it unreliable in some cases.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#22

Post by IshKebab »

So mostly this is just complaining about bugs. Does he think that native Android doesn't have bugs? One could easily write the same article for any UI framework.

Also it seems like he is complaining that the Flutter team actually uses a public bug tracker. Does he really prefer Android's bug tracker? The place where bug reports go to die. A year or so ago they gave up on it and basically closed every bug as obsolete.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#23

Post by lovelearning »

I have a couple of android app PoCs in mind but didn't want to go down the Android SDK way which IMO is becoming more and more complicated and verbose with every release.

Just tried Flutter and React-Native yesterday for the first time, and I'm sorry to say both were sorely disappointing.

Flutter was easier to install and get working, but Dart seems to be as verbose as Java with some JavaScript style syntax mixed in. The main dart file was as verbose as a boilerplate native SDK Activity.

RN was worse, though I expected it to be simpler. Something called metro server nearly froze the entire machine on every attempt. Had to power off and restart about 5 times. Then, based on GitHub discussions, built something else called watchman from sources. The official docs don't mention that watchman is critical. That improved it for a while but then the system wide near-freeze came back again. I wasn't even able to display a simple hello world app because of installation and deployment problems.

So far, Kivy seems to be the only alternative that is both simple to code and to deploy. Its file sizes are massive, but given that I already find Android SDK so frustrating to design and implement quickly, I don't want alternatives that are equally frustrating.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#24

Post by hardwaresofton »

For those who are looking for an alternative to Flutter/React Native, please check out Nativescript @ https://docs.nativescript.org!

It's different in a few key ways:

- Draws native components (Flutter draws every pixel)

- Pure JS native (i.e. JNI powered) shim layer (you can write stuff like `const intent = new Intent()`)

- Typescript as first-class (not quite so with React Native, and IMO Typescript > Dart as far as type systems and ergonomics are concerned)

- Ability to use both Angular and Vue to structure your app (there's also projects out there like Svelte-Native, which is extremely promising from the performance perspective)

- More community driven project (with Progress standing behind, following the open-source & extra features business model)

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#25

Post by Const-me »

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…

> Windows apps usually just re-invent all kinds of UI elements

It wasn't always this way. Before Win8, most apps used native controls on Windows.

When it became apparent GPU rendering is the way forward, MS re-implemented them in WPF. It does draw everything from scratch, because the backend is now DirectX 9. But it was a first party reimplementation, the UX is good.

Then came Windows 8 and Windows 10, trying to converge PCs and phones. They screw up the UX. Now windows phones are shut down, but UX on PCs still suffers the consequences. The new GUI framework is better then ever, but there's no consistent UX on top.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#26

Post by jazoom »

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.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#27

Post by gitgud »

This seems like a fairly biased post (as he admits himself). Flutter has a lot of problems, but if you've used any other cross-platform system, you know it's a hard problem to solve.

A friend described it to me as "Unity for apps", which I think is pretty positive and accurate.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#28

Post by deanclatworthy »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #24

For those who are looking for an alternative to Flutter/React Native, please check out Nativescript @ https://docs.nativescript.org ! It's different in a few key ways: - Draws native components (Flutter draws every pixel) - Pure JS native (i.e. JNI powered) shim layer (you can write stuff like `const intent = new Intent()`) - Typescript as first-class (not quite so with React Native, and IMO Typescript > Dart as far…

Looks interesting, but from the homepage I had absolutely no idea this had anything to do with apps. What would be a good place to start?

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#29

Post by pcr910303 »

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.

> Some would say re-writing the same app 5 times (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android) and maintaining 5 codebases is a bad idea.

Yeah, that's true. I'm looking forwards to React Native (AFAIK it uses the native JS engine + native toolkits) and libui.

I'm also hoping for declarative UI frameworks like SwiftUI so that the underlying framework/runtime can generate the appropriate UI for the exact target platform.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#30

Post by jimmcslim »

TylerE wrote: post #4

Is “one week of electric scooter rental in Bucharest” the new world currency?

‘Mobile phone minutes’ were a common medium of exchange in parts of Africa (Kenya?) for a while (and maybe still is?)... mobility is also another commonly desirable service, so sure, why not?
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