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Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

harrischris.com

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Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

#51
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Since every pixel on the UI is rendered by the framework" This is a deal breaker for me. It's not about the ui feeling a bit off - the drawer going over instead of pushing things or some such, it's about losing the integration with the native OS. For example the android version of the gallery app shown elsewhere doesn't adjust to font size changes (which can be done at the system level), won't make a sound when clic…

The clicking sound on button presses has been fixed in the latest build, and the Flutter team is working on accessibility. But I agree that a Flutter app will always have some deficiencies compared to a native app. However, the question is whether a Flutter app will be Good Enough when the alternative is writing two separate apps . I would argue that even in the current alpha stage it's getting pretty close to Good E…

> However, the question is whether a .. [Flutter, Cordova, React-native etc app] .. will be Good Enough when the alternative is writing two separate apps

This is a more important consideration than is often given credit for, perhaps because the perspective we most often read about is the high end of the industry. But vast amounts of software is written to extremely tight budgets, often for small businesses, where there is flat-out zero chance of two native apps being written. It's choose-your-platform, or something cross-platform.

For very many of these kinds of apps, which are pretty much invisible from the blogs/HN/medium world, RN/Flutter/Cordova etc are perfectly appropriate. The fact that these may not be the best platforms from which to use the very latest, most hardware-entwined OS features, or to do highly custom 'delightful' bits of UX, is often in this world quite irrelevant.

Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

#52

As a native mobile developer of several years, I've always been somewhat skeptical of the various cross-platform solutions that have emerged over the years. The WebView-based solutions weren't fast enough and sometimes behaved differently across devices because of different WebView versions. With React Native, the impression was far better because the performance actually can be quite good. But it's still hard to abs…

"Since every pixel on the UI is rendered by the framework" This is a deal breaker for me. It's not about the ui feeling a bit off - the drawer going over instead of pushing things or some such, it's about losing the integration with the native OS. For example the android version of the gallery app shown elsewhere doesn't adjust to font size changes (which can be done at the system level), won't make a sound when clic…

The interesting part of Flutter for me is that it powers Fuchsia.

IF Fuchsia becomes a major thing, like the future of Android (and I can't emphasise enough how much it is uncertain right now) then it might become very interesting as a way to publish your new app on Fuchsia while being able to publish it on Android as well in order to support `legacy` devices (again, supposing that Android is abandoned in favor of Fuchsia)

Otherwise, it is 'just' another hybrid solution with the usual caveats.

Re: Initial experience creating cross-platform apps with Flutter and Dart

#53
post #2

> So Flutter is actually pushing pixels itself, sounds strange, but it works The siren song of cross-platform development sounds so sweet to the ears and I've fallen for it quite a few times only to get bitten in the end. Introducing another layer between you and the source has several drawbacks: it's an additional source for bugs, it makes you reliant on the middle man to be timely with updates to keep pace of the n…

The other issue is if this middle layer decides to stop supporting older os releases. We cannot force the users of our app to upgrade.
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