Flutter is good, I echo the author's sentiments. I wrote a Flutter app for Android in a very short period, relative to my Android Java attempt.

The use of widgets saves a lot of time, leaving one to focus on connecting everything together. It's also easier to learn than React Native (for me at least).

The current downside for me has been the lack of maps (I'm aware of current efforts). I also hit a weird Firebase Messaging bug that leads to an infinite loop of the app opening itself [0].

I agree with the author regarding the strong Firebase push. The community doesn't yet seem large enough, so outside of wine of the Google supported plugins, it's sometimes a struggle.

I am building a second app in Flutter, using the new Material stuff that Google announced this year.

[0] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/18524

I really want to get into mobile development, but I have major obstacles with default platform APIs: I don't have a Mac (and cannot afford one ATM), the Android Studio is unusably heavy for my decent laptop, and writing Android apps w/o the studio seems prohibitively difficult. In this situation, Flutter is a liberating force for me. I have recently started learning it, and I can just keep writing my code in Emacs, while running the app on a phone with hot reload, and without my laptop melting. Thanks to whomever created it.

Can someone compare their experience with Flutter or even React Native, versus writing separate platform-native Swift/Java versions for iOS and Android?

I don't often hear about the true accounting of time spent learning and grappling with the limitations of cross-platform frameworks, including debugging and workarounds, versus just using the platform vendor tools.

It just sort of seems like it's assumed that it's a huge time waste to maintain separate codebases. But I wonder if you gain other advantages that might outweigh it, like not having to "fight" the intermediary layer and getting first-class access to the underlying APIs, platform features and debugging tools. Thoughts?

I totally understand the upside of writing one app for both platforms, but at the end of the day they are still two different platforms. It seems unlikely you’re going to make a high quality app unless you give each version the individualized attention they really need.

Maybe these dual platform frameworks are fine for something like a company internal app where it’s okay if you don’t get everything “just right”. But otherwise I’d rather just go pure native, even if it means alienating half my user base or spending 2x resources. It’s worth it in most cases IMO.

Granted I’ve only spent a couple weeks with React Native about a year ago, so maybe I just need to give it another go.

Flutter looks interesting. As a React/React Native dev, I found this doc page particularly useful and enlightening:

https://flutter.io/flutter-for-react-native/

I'm wanting to try Flutter for a new app I'm planning. But a blocker is that it doesn't (yet?) run on Linux, which is a deal breaker for me.

I didn't know what Flutter was and from the title I assumed it was abandoned (how it was to write a flutter app).

So, I just got that excitement from having something cool to learn.

The article mentions removing simple elements, e.g. "‘Center’ widget is nice for a Hello, World container but I never understood it. Why can’t ‘Container’, something that’s way more prevalent have a property to do the same thing?"

I'm perfectly happy with the nesting of simple elements. Having a single 'Container' also handle various layout rules is what makes all the positioning options of CSS difficult. Similarly for constraint systems. Composable, single function components are easy to learn and use. I'm just presuming that it has good runtime characteristics and haven't run into any issues yet.

Interesting this is on the front page, yet no comments. I'm very curious as to others thoughts. We are about to start a new react native app and are considering flutter. It will be webrtc based also. Extensive experienced design team, but no dart experience. Any thoughts?

I am working on an Flutter android app, I find it still very laggy. Even the official Gallery app from flutter team laggy. I am hoping they will sort it out by the time they release it from beta.

there's a lot of enthusiasm, yet, i feel less enthusiastic about Flutter after reading this.

i had not thought about this right in the past. i hadn't factored in the reality of needing to maintain two separate UI trees, one with Material Design widgets and one with Cupertino widgets. this makes me think one of the really big advantages i thought Flutter had -- a unified UI -- is not really realistic.

i must be misunderstanding this