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Flutter 2

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Flutter 2

#521

Post by OvermindDL1 »

technofiend wrote: post #173
kyrra wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(googler, opinion is my own). The (new) google Pay app on iOS[0] and Android[1] are flutter based. I'm on Android, so I don't know it's behavior on iOS. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-pay-save-pay-manage/id1... [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

The app works fine although as of today it's still tagged Beta in the Google Play store, which may give some people pause. NFC on the other hand is so unreliable as to moot the use of Google Pay, which is unfortunate. I really prefer tap-to-pay over anything else, but not at the expense of making people in line behind me wait as I try various workarounds like toggling NFC. I realize there's nothing you can do about i…

Wait, is this why my tap to pay mysteriously stopped working in the past few months on my Pixel 4?!

Re: Flutter 2

#522

Post by Hixie »

oblio wrote: post #474
Hixie wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "all of that". What I described _is_ the web.

It's painting stuff in a canvas and not using the standard web controls. It's the web in the sense that almost every UI toolkit also offers a canvas (for example Tk does this) and you can reimplement every control using it. That doesn't make your new toolkit in a toolkit Tk.

But why would an app that writes to a WebGL canvas be any harder to maintain than an app that uses HTML controls? If anything, it'd be likely to be easier to maintain -- we (the web standards community) are much more likely to change how a particular element is supposed to work than to change WebGL in an incompatible way.

Re: Flutter 2

#523

Post by golergka »

yagodragon wrote: post #112

We're all complaining about how js is a bad language, tooling is a mess, and how the web is fundamentally built for documents and makes it hard to create app-like experiences. Now, Google comes and creates a whole new UI toolkit from scratch, couples it with a very beautiful SDK and component framework and offers a far better programming language than js could ever be but we're still nagging. I was also pretty disapp…

FWIW, modern Typescript is the best mainstream-ish language I've used in production. Dart is decent, but I don't think it's that good.

Re: Flutter 2

#524

Post by buu700 »

avar wrote: post #478
ryandrake wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even fully understand why "cross-platform UI development" is such a holy grail. Is it that expensive to separate your business logic from UI and write the small UI layer in whatever the platform's "best practice" native language is? Is it that hard to find developers who know more than one programming language? With a lot of these frameworks and higher level abstractions, if you go off the toy-app happy path,…

And write your shared business logic in what language? If it's a C library perhaps you could do this on iOS and Android, but how is that going to run in a browser? I'm aware of things like the LLVM based C to JS compilers, but they're not really viable for anything non-trivial. That's why a lot of shops are writing the same logic N times in N languages and frameworks. It can actually be easier than having to target s…

I'm aware of things like the LLVM based C to JS compilers, but they're not really viable for anything non-trivial.

emscripten/WebAssembly is pretty viable.

Re: Flutter 2

#525

Post by farisjarrah »

MrPatan wrote: post #501
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what personal income has to do with anything. Hand held touch devices have revolutionized Internet access. The deeper down the income scale you go, the less likely you are to encounter a personal computer while you’ll still likely encounter a smart phone. Amazon will work on the web or as an app on that phone, but with the app the user experience will be better. That may be because Google and Apple have inte…

F: A few months ago I'd have said apps. Now after their latest spat with A, maybe they're having a think? A: web, for sure. That's how they make their money. A: I wonder how much money they would lose if they shut down their website? Would they sell their stuff on A instead? N: Who cares, it's only there to make the acronym nicer. G: Web.

What would Microsoft say?

Re: Flutter 2

#526

Post by themacguffinman »

danShumway wrote: post #402
eseidelGoogle wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Flutter Eng. Dir. here] I really appreciate the feedback. We clearly have more work to do on the Web side of Flutter. Unlike the Mobile side which has shipped 100,000s of apps, the Web side may be up to like 1000. :) So many more issues to address as we work closely with more users to get their apps into production. If you'd like to track progress on any of these, I'd encourage you (or anyone else reading) to please…

I appreciate that building something that works even this well targeting Canvas must have been a metric ton of work, and I'm impressed. But that's kind of the issue -- it cannot possibly be more work to maintain a separate rendering/compilation pipeline for browsers than it is to rebuild the entirety of Chrome's DOM engine in WebGL for CanvasKit. I just don't see how Flutter is going to keep pace with "native" web ap…

Supporting new and unique APIs/inputs/etc like WebVR is a pretty classic cross-platform problem and it's usually addressed by allowing native hooks. Flutter has MethodChannels which let you call native methods in the underlying "platform host". It also supports "PlatformViews" which let you embed native widgets.

It doesn't really need to have instant parity with "native" web apps at everything. Maybe Flutter is a poor fit if you have extensive native requirements. That's okay.

Re: Flutter 2

#527

Post by yesimahuman »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #399
awesomepeter wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had to pick a multiplatform solution (for whatever reason) which one would you pick? I've been exploring this space a bit, and it's really hard to form an opinion on this.

I've been in that situation 3 times, I choose React Native and Flutter each once. I was forced to use Ionic. I would NEVER use Ionic again, terrible experience and very difficult to get decent quality/performance. I like Flutter's technology much more. I like that it is natively compiled. I dislike that it has it's own UI toolkit. React Native with TypeScript is a highly productive environment but I LOATHED the devel…

Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with Ionic. The stack has improved considerably in recent years and actually Capacitor, our replacement for Cordova, was just rated the highest satisfaction mobile tool on the latest State of JS survey. Cordova was definitely a sore spot for Us but we’ve since moved beyond that and you can use any web stack to build apps with Capacitor (seeing a lot of React + Next.js apps of late)

Re: Flutter 2

#528

Post by yesimahuman »

vially wrote: post #515
The_rationalist wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or give Ionic react a try

I would not recommend Ionic. I've been using it in a medium sized app for about 3 years now and I get the feeling it's good for getting started, but once your app grows past a certain size it's starting to create more issues than it solves. Some examples from the top of my head: - various performance issues (e.g.: memory leaks which haven't been fixed for years [1]) - their push/pop router navigation seems like a rea…

This heavily depends on the framework you choose to use, and modern Ionic uses the stock tooling your framework does, so build times should be on par with any other project of that framework type. Earlier versions of Ionic had custom tooling and much slower build times.

Re: Flutter 2

#529

Post by mdoms »

heavyset_go wrote: post #445
eseidelGoogle wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Flutter Eng. Dir. here] I really appreciate the feedback. We clearly have more work to do on the Web side of Flutter. Unlike the Mobile side which has shipped 100,000s of apps, the Web side may be up to like 1000. :) So many more issues to address as we work closely with more users to get their apps into production. If you'd like to track progress on any of these, I'd encourage you (or anyone else reading) to please…

I don't understand how breaking accessibility with Flutter wouldn't mean that companies that use it on the web are violating the ADA.

I don't know what that is but I assume it's some kind of American nonsense I don't care at all about.

Re: Flutter 2

#530

Post by clusterfish »

ksec wrote: post #475
qbasic_forever wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same engine of HTML + JS has powered entire businesses and industries from $0 to billions and billions of dollars over 25 years. Amazon.com would not exist without web browsers, and its entire trillion dollar+ business is an enormous bet on the web. I would say there's zero danger of the web going away when folks like that (and many, many more... Google, Facebook, etc.) depend on the web for every microsecond of…

>Amazon.com would not exist without web browsers, and its entire trillion dollar+ business is an enormous bet on the web. Except 70% of e-commerce, 90%+ of Social Media are now on Mobile Apps, where they were all previously 100% Web. The problem with Tech industry is that too much thinking is about centralised, decentralised, Technology with backend front end. etc. When its users or customers dont give a fuss at all.

That's because the current mobile platforms were engineered from the ground up specifically to kill the web in favour of walled garden app stores.

We'll have to see how long this approach will stand up for, both legally and technically. With real open source phones and antitrust developments we might see a revival of mobile web eventually.

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