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FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

flutterflow.io

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Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#21

Post by Escapado »

abelsm wrote: post #15
offtop5 wrote: post #12

I was very interested up until I saw the pricing. $70 a month is way too much. A big issue here is just how easy flutter is, I'd rather invest 20 hours once to build it using Dart, then to pay $800 a year.

FlutterFlow cofounder here. Thanks for your input on our pricing. It's more than knowing how to code, we've been building with Flutter for a while now, but there's still no way we could have coded FlutterMet in under an hour. It would take us 10 hrs+ to manually do that. But it took https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXsjnd_4SBo Also, we allow you to push the generated code to your Github repository, so you don't have t…

To be honest this is the best selling point in my opinion.

It's a great tool for MVP scenarios and especially in business contexts that price tag is entire negligible compared to the hourly rate of most engineers! So a single hour saved will already make up for it.

Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#22

Post by jamil7 »

sgt wrote: post #10
machello13 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks fine, depending on your taste anyway, but there's noticeable scrolling lag and animations are stuttery the first time they play. Feels sluggish in general.

I would consider Flutter apps that have been compiled to ARM and runs on an iPhone natively (basically just using a canvas to draw pixels on) is very fast. However Flutter web is not very fast, but it's getting there.

There are currently some performance issues on iOS, this being the most well known https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/76180

Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#23

Post by fredgrott »

Considering one has to hand write an ios approach and a material design one unless they support the Flutter Platform widgets plugins most of your would probably need to avoid this.

My bias, I am not the project lead on flutter Platform widgets but I am one of the lower end contributors.

Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#24

Post by abelsm »

offtop5 wrote: post #18
abelsm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FlutterFlow cofounder here. Thanks for your input on our pricing. It's more than knowing how to code, we've been building with Flutter for a while now, but there's still no way we could have coded FlutterMet in under an hour. It would take us 10 hrs+ to manually do that. But it took https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXsjnd_4SBo Also, we allow you to push the generated code to your Github repository, so you don't have t…

Anyway you can come down to maybe 30$. Anything over $50 becomes a line item in my budget, I can't justify spending $50 a month in the hobbyist space. It's a great idea, I just don't think I can really afford it.

We have a $30/mo plan. :)

Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#26

Post by asgreaves »

FlutterFlow cofounder here! We thought the HN crowd would want to see the generated code for FlutterMet, so here it is: https://github.com/FlutterFlow/FlutterMetSample/tree/flutter...

We try to generate clean Flutter code that follows best practices – we have a long way to go, but we couldn't be more excited.

Edit: Also, here's the video of us building it (in just under an hour): https://youtu.be/TXsjnd_4SBo

Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#27

Post by abelsm »

mkw5053 wrote: post #25

Is it possible to write completely custom components?

We don't support editing code in FlutterFlow atm. But this is something we want to enable.

What we see a lot of our users do now is push to Github (flutterflow branch), and merge in to their main branch where they have their custom logic.

Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#28

Post by antris »

swiley wrote: post #16
primitivesuave wrote: post #6

I'm genuinely curious how easy no-code app development has to become in order to be adopted at scale in the software industry. Right now I'm still getting the sense that most companies prefer to hire a dedicated app development team and have full control over the architecture.

Most "apps" are really replacements for simple web pages because of the way Apple is distorting computing.

I don't know where this Apple dig is coming from. Most applications are just putting a bunch of strings into database and displaying strings from a database. This has always been the case with or without Apple, and it works the same way regardless of platform.

Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#29

Post by abelsm »

sz4kerto wrote: post #20

I've tried it out, registered for the premium to check out the details. Biggest problem: querying Firebase is problematic. I can bind a collection to a ListView, but in many cases I'd like to map a field to something. For example I have a list of "purchases" and I'd like to map the "buyerId" to an email address. This can't be done, and the generated code is hard to adapt to this kind of use case. And therein lies the…

Thanks so much for sharing feedback!

In this scenario, your collection is "purchases" and there's a "buyerId" field in a purchase document? And you want to get the email from buyerId?

If buyerId is a uid, you can do another query to get the user document from uid and get the email address from that. I may be misunderstanding the question.

Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#30

Post by petra »

primitivesuave wrote: post #6

I'm genuinely curious how easy no-code app development has to become in order to be adopted at scale in the software industry. Right now I'm still getting the sense that most companies prefer to hire a dedicated app development team and have full control over the architecture.

No-code is is limited.

I've read about an hospital management system implemented by low-code. So if it can be useful to that complexity levels, maybe the problem isn't technical, but more about marketing, control over the platform, or just general resistance by software developers.

So i wonder, how long do those shifts towards a much higher productivity platform take in the software industry ?

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