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Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

plei.one

61–70 of 242 posts

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#61
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hardly some toy SDK that is only suitable for MVPs. Google’s single biggest money maker Ads is built with it. It’s hardly a Google specific thing either there are a number of mega sized players also strongly betting on it for some fairly mission critical stuff if I understood correctly.

Google AdWords is made with Dart, specifically AngularDart, not Flutter. Edit: yes, Google Ads the mobile app is made with Flutter.

Sorry I was referring to the mobile apps not the web experience.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One single platform for cross platform development is enough motivation and react native has improved a lot in the past year. The entire concept of developing the same app multiple times for different platforms is just so mind numbingly dumb. 3x the engineering team, 3 different platforms with all their different idiosyncrasies. The impossibility of maintaining feature parity across all three platforms. 3x the testin…

I can see some apps needing to be native (ex: using AR/ML libraries where you need to squeeze everything out of the phone). However, for most apps I use, they could easily be mobile optimized websites wrapped in an app.

> I can see some apps needing to be native (ex: using AR/ML libraries where you need to squeeze everything out of the phone)

I agree but all that's needed there is an escape hatch with some way for the non-native interface to interact with the native code.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#63

A good example of Flutter desktop is https://rive.app/downloads - curious on others' thoughts of how that compares to Electron or other choices that are out there.

I tried it, it's quite snappy compared to Electron, I assume because it's AOT compiled.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#64

Hello, I'm from the Flutter desktop team. Thank you for the excellent feedback, this is truly invaluable. Here are some updates from our side: 1. Custom context menus - We just added this feature in Flutter 3.7, which was released two weeks ago. Please give this a try and let us know what you think! 2. Multi-window - This is a high priority for the Flutter team, we have several engineers working on this project curre…

Is impeler going to affect (in good way) the performance/latency on desktop too? (I think it's mostly for iOS now, right)?

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#65
post #58
post #17

The more "solutions" that are developed for desktop + mobile cross-platform applications, the more I see highlighted how different the paradigms are, and how the streams really shouldn't be crossed. They're both UIs viewed on a screen that you interact with by pointing and clicking, but the similarities end there. The entire output of this cross-platform effort has been awkward applications that run everywhere but fe…

Fully native isn't especially realistic. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, general purpose tooling written by a small team can't support multiple native UIs. What often works for me is something like Wails, but it has its limitations. For instance there's no multi-window functionality there either, and while the new Wails supports more OS integrations there's still some aspects that need improvement to co…

I'm using flutter_rust_bridge, it works pretty well. However, I do like Dart due to a few features it has, like code generation so that I can build my own language features if I want to, I use that pretty extensively.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#66
post #17

The more "solutions" that are developed for desktop + mobile cross-platform applications, the more I see highlighted how different the paradigms are, and how the streams really shouldn't be crossed. They're both UIs viewed on a screen that you interact with by pointing and clicking, but the similarities end there. The entire output of this cross-platform effort has been awkward applications that run everywhere but fe…

Well, web designing does blur the lines. You can easily create a website that is both desktop and mobile friendly by implementing responsive design. Translating that to a native experience seems to be the problem

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#67

Hello, I'm from the Flutter desktop team. Thank you for the excellent feedback, this is truly invaluable. Here are some updates from our side: 1. Custom context menus - We just added this feature in Flutter 3.7, which was released two weeks ago. Please give this a try and let us know what you think! 2. Multi-window - This is a high priority for the Flutter team, we have several engineers working on this project curre…

That's great to hear! When I get the chance, I'll update the article to note that custom context menus are actually supported now.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#68
post #64

Hello, I'm from the Flutter desktop team. Thank you for the excellent feedback, this is truly invaluable. Here are some updates from our side: 1. Custom context menus - We just added this feature in Flutter 3.7, which was released two weeks ago. Please give this a try and let us know what you think! 2. Multi-window - This is a high priority for the Flutter team, we have several engineers working on this project curre…

Is impeler going to affect (in good way) the performance/latency on desktop too? (I think it's mostly for iOS now, right)?

The plan AFAIK is to make it the default everywhere but they are just rolling out each platform in some kind of prioritised order.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#69
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hardly some toy SDK that is only suitable for MVPs. Google’s single biggest money maker Ads is built with it. It’s hardly a Google specific thing either there are a number of mega sized players also strongly betting on it for some fairly mission critical stuff if I understood correctly.

> Google’s single biggest money maker Ads is built with it. If Flutter disappeared tomorrow nobody would even notice it. How much functionality do you think is there?

In March 2021 there were 150 thousand Flutter apps in Google Play store.

In May 2022 - 500 thousand.

See: https://www.nomtek.com/blog/flutter-app-examples

Today: I'm too lazy but you can google for more up-to-date stats.

"nobody" is gigantically wrong.

Flutter is extremely popular in mobile.

Web and desktop support is behind but it'll improve and popularity of Flutter on desktop and web will grow too.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#70
post #23

To me as someone who recently got into Flutter to make a side-project (mobile game) the most glaring problem isn't the lack of ecosystem or little UI issues the author mentions but the language itself. You had a green field to make the best programming language for creating UIs and you made Dart? Like what. I don't have particular issue with the heavy OOP paradigm but the fact you have to write so much boilerplate fe…

They didn’t create Dart for UI. It was dead and they shoehorned it into Flutter.

Yeah it was an attempt to fix JS before JS improved a lot in recent years, and before TS took off.
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