FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps • Hacker News Board

sgt wrote: post #9

I checked it out - but I think most developers would be more comfortable writing Dart code to develop Flutter code. I can see that something like FlutterFlow is useful if you need snippets to e.g. get a stylized layout with little effort. Kind of like a quick way of getting the look you want, and then pasting it back into Android Studio. Even then I'd change and improve the code - I see that the styles are a bit "har…

Of course the UI is laggy - the web app is built with Flutter! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#36

Post by treis » Fri, May 21, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

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.

On the contrary, that is way too cheap. Equal to approximately 30 minutes a month of a decent iOS developers time. If the product works it should deliver 10-100 times that value.

Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#37

Post by pjmlp » Fri, May 21, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

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.

That has been the case for most applications since green phosphor displays, just plain CRUD forms.

Works perfectly well for 90% of most businesses.

Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#38

Post by pjmlp » Fri, May 21, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

I am still looking for the equivalent of Visual Basic for making modern Web and mobile apps. It is exciting that we might finally be getting there!

VB is 30 years old this year and we still need to re-invent for the Web, sadly.

However there is stuff like OutSystems or Oracle Apex.

By the way Xojo does support WebAssembly.

Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#39

Post by wpietri » Fri, May 21, 2021, 9:22 PM UTC

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.

I think the point is more to take a set of common problems out of the software industry. The classic example for me here is the spreadsheet. For many of its uses, it's definitely not as good as bespoke software, but also way better than paying for a dedicated app development team.

Re: FlutterFlow: Low-code Flutter apps

#40

Post by kiawe_fire » Fri, May 21, 2021, 9:22 PM UTC

Initially this looks really nice - very much the kind of tooling I’ve thought about for Flutter since I started using it.

This product aside, though, I find it funny how the whole “reactive widget tree that gets rebuilt when data changes” and “everything is just nested objects with properties, no XML needed” trend felt like “backlash” against the UI Builders, Visual Basics, and Glades.

And yet now we’re building visual tools to control all the nested reactive component frameworks very much in that same vein.