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We're forking Flutter

flutterfoundation.dev

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Re: We're forking Flutter

#301

Post by jwells89 »

brewii wrote: post #278
deergomoo wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can appreciate that as a developer, but as a user I don’t particularly care that some company wants to ship identical looking apps on every device under the sun. I would prefer the apps I use to work and behave in a consistent way, using the same platform idioms I am used to. The software available and how it works was a large part of the reason I chose the platform I did. Of course, I recognise that, a. most peopl…

Pretty sure most large succesful apps have their own UI and UI design teams. Cant remember the last time i saw anything cupertino in an app. Even Apples own 'Home' app only loosely use cupertino. Id say the most noticable effect is the bottom modal sheet slide up effect. on ios the original screen animates into the background a little bit. Apps that dont implement this can be spotted but thats not unique to flutter a…

The two things that stick out the most to me are navigation behavior and text fields. Cross platform frameworks seldom get either right, with react native being particularly bad on the navigation front.

There are variances between Apple’s apps but they’re all using some combination of UIKit and SwiftUI regardless which limits how “wrong” they can be.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#302

Post by epcoa »

einpoklum wrote: post #292
epcoa wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that means one has to target both GTK and Qt to be native on Linux. Fat chance of that on anything but yet another music player or other relatively trivial UI app. In any event, that still doesn't answer what it means to be "native"? And my point is I think most definitions are dumb or useless. If I'm running a GTK desktop, Qt apps are generally not "native" no matter how much theme fuckery one tries. Native can a…

> So that means one has to target both GTK and Qt to be native on Linux. Doesn't it mean that you can target _either_ and be considered native? Also, I'm not sure I buy the claim that of "GTK and Qt are native" in the first place. I'd say either that there is no native UI, or if I must call something native, it's the toolkit the desktop environment uses. And yes, that does mean that there is no "Linux nativeness" lik…

> Doesn't it mean that you can target _either_ and be considered native?

Well, no because I was agreeing with you, if you're going to grudgingly accept your definition for native, the toolkit the desktop environment uses, that means you would have to target both Qt and GTK unless you want to draw a line in the sand and say fuck it to one of GNOME or KDE as assume they don't exist. Sorry GNUStep. And this is nothing to say of GTK 2-4.

I agree that just saying GTK or Qt are native in a vacuum outside of DE is a completely useless definition, and even taking DE into account is a tenuous one.

As for Windows, what GUI toolkit does the desktop environment there use? That's a trick question.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#303

Post by jwells89 »

justmarc wrote: post #253
pasc1878 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with this is most users only use one platform and so don't care. They just see the app as badly implemented as it does not match other apps on the platform.

Why would an app not looking like a native app automatically be seen as badly implemented?

Not all non-native-looking apps are badly implemented, but a huge number of apps that use cross-platform frameworks do so primarily as a means to cut costs because the goal is to make development as cheap as possible, and that shows in other aspects of these apps too. This creates an association between cheap/lazy apps and cross platform UI frameworks.

It’s kind of like the difference between VS Code and MS Teams. Same company, same underlying technology (Electron), but Code is good while Teams is awful because MS invests so much more in Code. Even so, Teams-type apps are what tends to come to mind when people think of Electron apps because those are so much more common.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#304

Post by zachrip »

reaperducer wrote: post #237
zachrip wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which flutter apps do I likely use?

According to its web site, eBay, New York Times, Square, American Airlines.

I'm suspicious of those because it shows an ebay logo but then shows an app I've never heard of or used...is this the same for all the other logos? Where does NYT use flutter?

Re: We're forking Flutter

#305

Post by Barrin92 »

lysace wrote: post #64
muglug wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming there are 20 million software engineers in the world writing code professionally, 1 million Flutter developers seems massively optimistic.

Yes. Realistically off by at least a magnitude. There is literally zero chance there's 1 million active developers working on this experimental Google Tech out there.

>working on this experimental Google Tech

while I'd agree with you that 1 million is too high, Flutter certainly is not experimental Google tech. It's widely used in particular internationally. I talked to a ByteDance guy two or three years ago and I think they alone had about 1k Flutter engineers. Nubank, Alibaba, BMW, Ebay use it extensively.

Flawed metric but eyeballing VScode Extension installs, Python 140m, c# 30 mil, Go 15 mil, Flutter 10 mil. It is very, very popular.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#306

Post by stux »

hersheyhersh wrote: post #279

Flutter founder here. We use Flutter to build Mezzi (www.mezzi.com). In fact, we've worked with the OP (Matt) on our app. He's super knowledgeable about Flutter and it's inner workings. A great dev too. Flutter is awesome, but there are definitely bugs that lie unfixed for an uncomfortable period of time. This is not unique to Flutter ... with any open source project there's a lag between bug reports and bug fixes. T…

> Flutter founder here.

Given that the literal founder of Flutter is in this thread using this introduction multiple times, it’s kinda hard to give you the benefit of the doubt that you honestly just meant “a founder using Flutter”.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#307

Post by jeremyjh »

epcoa wrote: post #204
1propionyl wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flutter is really not some big revelation and it's always shocking to me how it's evangelists act like it's the game changer no one else has noticed. It's just not that good? Just build native UIs. I don't know why cross platform UI has been such a hobbyhorse for so many for so long: it's a stupid idea.

What's a native UI? The only thing closeish to a native UI is macOS and iOS AppKit and UIKit. Winforms aka Win32 is still a thing, but Microsoft has been undogfooding that and putting out alternatives for years, now WinUI3 will definitely kill off Winforms for good! What is native on Linux? Gtk, Qt, Motif (lol)? And then Android? Ironic then that Google is the one behind Flutter. The concept of native outside of MacO…

Win32 is the native GUI toolkit on Windows. Winforms is a .NET wrapper to it. There isn't any debate to be had there. Yes, the same vendor provides other toolkits.

Linux is a kernel project, and different distributions are for many purposes best considered to be different OS's. Desktops based on Linux mostly are either GTK or QT, and so the native toolkit depends on the desktop you are using.

Is this too much fragmentation for users on those platforms to realistically expect commercial software to support them natively? Yes, of course, but that doesn't mean there is any confusion about what it would mean to do so.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#308

Post by jwells89 »

no_carrier wrote: post #285
divan wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do that? I just opened my phone, and the last app I used was a food delivery app. How can I figure out if it's a Flutter app or a native one?

I don't think people are able to tell a Flutter app from any other cross platform/web framework. They just think they can.

It’s more difficult to distinguish if an app is Flutter or some other cross platform framework, but “native or not” is very easy on iOS. Even React Native, which is the least foreign, has tells.

On Android it’s more difficult, partially because it’s kind of like Windows where Google/Microsoft uses 50 separate reimplementations of Material/Fluent and there’s no consistency to be found anywhere.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#309

Post by throwaway032023 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #63
throwaway032023 wrote: post #40

Words are cheap. Seems like: - guy wants to add PR more aggressively to a code base than Flutter currently is - isn’t clear if they have a concept of handling compatibility between fork and original - why not be a labor organizing entity and work with the flutter team? Some of the PR that I am aware of that are stale and could be good candidates - are difficult design decisions and stakes need to be put in the group.…

Note that I know nothing of the Flutter team/culture and am only answering generally: >why not be a labor organizing entity and work with the flutter team? Depends on the maintainers/team. I've definitely seen many a bureaucracy that slows down FOSS to a crawl of bug fixes and feature progression. If you make enough PRs that are ignored for weeks or months, you'll realize this isn't really a team ready for nor intere…

There is a comment above that shows the founding former didn’t want to fix tests in his PR. Flutter is massive and it’s critical infrastructure. The tests are critical to up-keep. The tests are probably a majority of the work. Which makes sense for something that has such a large surface area.

I think this is an emotional reaction from someone has never managed a large project. Merging PRs and releasing them isn’t the problem. I hope they understand that.

Flutter is amazing. Web, desktop and mobile that actually work is nearly magical. Yes there are priorities. Yes the desktop isn’t as high priority of web. It does work. Hell. Collect money and fund Hixie or others to prioritize patches community feel should go in. That is constructive and methodical/reproducible.

Forking a massive code base, applying PR and not conforming to the source repo standards (tests whether that is golden or not) - just seems not well thought out.

I think community could fund a well known developer to fix desktop issues and have PR adhere to Flutter standards. It’s a ton of work. But seems like it’s a money/dev/process issue. Not a PR merging exercise.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#310

Post by lysace »

Barrin92 wrote: post #305
lysace wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Realistically off by at least a magnitude. There is literally zero chance there's 1 million active developers working on this experimental Google Tech out there.

>working on this experimental Google Tech while I'd agree with you that 1 million is too high, Flutter certainly is not experimental Google tech. It's widely used in particular internationally. I talked to a ByteDance guy two or three years ago and I think they alone had about 1k Flutter engineers. Nubank, Alibaba, BMW, Ebay use it extensively. Flawed metric but eyeballing VScode Extension installs, Python 140m, c# 3…

100k seems more reasonable.
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