Flutter looks good, but is painful

https://medium.com/@bernaferrari/from-android-dev-flutter-looks-good-but-is-painful-here-are-my-frustrations-with-it-81b4bbe739f8

by xhroot • 7 years ago

208 188 7 years ago

medium.com

latchkey2• 7 years ago

I've recently done a bit of Flutter development and have enjoyed it quite a bit. The third party Provider API solves all the state management issues, it should become the default.

OP has some valid points for sure, but fact is that any framework is going to have issues. Just part of the game.

sgt• 7 years ago

That sounds interesting. What would be the go to documentation for a good Provider API implementation (i.e. like a best practice guide with an example)?

hansjorg• 7 years ago

See the official Flutter guide on state management: https://flutter.dev/docs/development/data-and-backend/state-...

It refers to other solutions as well, but the hands-on example is with provider (starting in the "Simple app state management" chapter)

latchkey2• 7 years ago

The author isn't the best at documentation, but his code is excellent and he is very helpful if you ask nicely...

https://github.com/rrousselGit/provider

ibejoeb• 7 years ago

Flutter is young, and there are bugs, but velocity is high and it is advancing the state of the art. It is a huge leap in accessibility and productivity.

I really don't understand the complaint about setup. If expanding an archive and setting an environment variable are that daunting, wait til you try mobile development...

Snark aside, remember phonegap/cordova? Pine for those glory days of low friction?

andrekandre• 7 years ago

it is advancing the state of the art

in what ways?

TylerE• 7 years ago

Is “one week of electric scooter rental in Bucharest” the new world currency?

jimmcslim• 7 years ago

‘Mobile phone minutes’ were a common medium of exchange in parts of Africa (Kenya?) for a while (and maybe still is?)... mobility is also another commonly desirable service, so sure, why not?

tomca32• 7 years ago

Yup, it still is. Lots of that in eastern parts of Africa like Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda. I'm sure cell service providers are pretty happy with it since it turned them into banks.

oblio• 7 years ago

If it is, be careful. It's scary riding electric scooters (or bikes) in Bucharest! :-)

wastedhours2• 7 years ago

Yeah, you couldn't pay me to ride a bike or scooter around Bucharest!

nnq6• 7 years ago

...only if in the sense that money can get you killed :) Drivers aren't that friendly and attentive :P

_-___________-_2• 7 years ago

it took them almost a year to add support for 64 bit in APK

While the author's confusion is understandable, because most of the people posting in the linked Github issue have the same confusion, it's always been possible to build a 64-bit APK (and a 32-bit APK). The linked issue is actually about building a single "fat" APK with both 32-bit and 64-bit native libraries in it, which Google Play Store then repackages to have just the needed library for the device it's being downloaded to.

Shipping two separate APKs has always been possible and gives the same end result for just a little more build process work, which is (/should be) automated anyway.

I've been shipping an app like this for some time now, and it's really not a hardship in any way, certainly not one that justifies the amount of hand-wringing in that Github issue.

bernaferrari3• 7 years ago

Author here, I'm sorry for the confusion. I'll correct the article with what you said.

iainmerrick4• 7 years ago

What was the holdup, though? This should have been almost a trivial feature to implement (just make an APK with multiple .so files in separate directories).

It must have been either low priority (except the Play Store has been strongly encouraging fat binaries for some time now) or there were additional complications (which makes me more suspicious about the stability of the framework).

_-___________-_2• 7 years ago

Maybe low priority / insufficient resources, or the issue didn't get triaged and brought to the attention of the right person to fix it quickly enough. The fix wasn't complicated at all once it was eventually in, so I don't think it was any deep issue with the framework.

krzat5• 7 years ago

I like Flutter very much. In some aspects it is much better than native iOS development. But it's far from perfect, so perhaps this post will prompt Google to hire more people to handle issues.

But, it's not like other companies are much better at this. At React Native they just autoclose them after some time. While Apple most likely has more open issues than Flutter but the data is not public.

desaiguddu2• 7 years ago

I am working on 3 Flutter Applications & 2 of them are currently in production. On average we receive 1 major bottleneck a month, which gets resolved with 3rd Party fixes.

Happy to help if you are stuck on any issue with Flutter. Our background is native application development, so far this is the best Cross-Platform Development toolkit available.

Phonegap, Ionic & others are web wrappers. PLEASE let Flutter grow!

GeneralTspoon• 7 years ago

React Native isn't a web wrapper. It uses a Javascript engine to render native iOS/Android components (unlike Flutter, which doesn't use native components, and instead renders everything from scratch).

desaiguddu2• 7 years ago

Gotcha! Edited. From my experience found Flutter more reliable & easy to operate compared to React Native.

gitgud2• 7 years ago

Because Flutter has it's own rendering engine, it's inherently more consistent in refresh rates and UI components.

Although React Native shows Native elements, they vary slightly across different; devices, platforms, OS's etc.. this can create many weird edge cases, which makes it unreliable in some cases.

onetimeaccount1• 7 years ago

neither is CodenameOne (Java/Kotlin based)

curyous• 7 years ago

I moved from Flutter to native Android development and found it to be much more pleasant..

ensiferum• 7 years ago

So.. in summary Flutter is a buggy unfinished and badly designed framework. Nothing new here folks.

hoskdoug• 7 years ago

Not as simple as that. Some people clearly manage to create things effectively with it. Newcomers can see this but understand that there will be difficulties.

The difficulty for newcomers is anticipating where the pain points might be. Detailed articles like this are rare and a huge help with assisting with decisions on whether to invest time into it.

mirceal• 7 years ago

yeah no. i would not bet the farm on this one especially when it comes to developing for Apple devices. Google just doesn’t have the track record to inspire confidence that anything they do is going to stick around

hitekker2• 7 years ago

Last major discussion and conclusions about Flutter:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19853247

bsaul3• 7 years ago

Does anyone has a link for the market shares of cross-platform mobile development tech ( react native, phonegap, flutter, etc) vs native ? in terms of apps on the stores, for example.

i know they were considered experimental a few years ago but wonder what’s the status today.

pcr9103033• 7 years ago

While this has little relationship to the original article... We really should be trying to use the native GUI toolkit (or cross-platform native UI libraries like libui), not using Flutter-esque libraries that draws everything from scratch.

Coherent UI is a very important point to users IMO. Users can assume that some special feature from App X will also work on App Y.

For example, in macOS Cocoa, textboxes have universal readline-esque keybindings (and is configurable globally) which, as an Emacs user, very, very useful.

Most Mac apps use Cocoa as the GUI toolkit, so basically all kinds of apps can benefit these keybindings.

Another example of this directly benefiting users is the addition of tabs in macOS Sierra.

macOS Sierra added tabs to Cocoa apps, and applications could get the feature without additional modification. I can use tabs in any application, with the same look-and-feel, in all apps.

Stories like these are mostly only macOS; since Windows apps usually just re-invent all kinds of UI elements, while Linux's GUI toolkits are super-fragmented. (GTK vs Qt is one thing, and there are lots of other options!)

Adding Flutter or any other UI library that draws everything from scratch is a bad idea.

Const-me3• 7 years ago

Windows apps usually just re-invent all kinds of UI elements

It wasn't always this way. Before Win8, most apps used native controls on Windows.

When it became apparent GPU rendering is the way forward, MS re-implemented them in WPF. It does draw everything from scratch, because the backend is now DirectX 9. But it was a first party reimplementation, the UX is good.

Then came Windows 8 and Windows 10, trying to converge PCs and phones. They screw up the UX. Now windows phones are shut down, but UX on PCs still suffers the consequences. The new GUI framework is better then ever, but there's no consistent UX on top.

pcr9103033• 7 years ago

Before Win8, most apps used native controls on Windows.

Yeah, it's true but the problem is that the native controls were very limited. There was no central notification system so every Windows messaging app reinvented notifications(unlike macOS which converged to Growl and later, the Notification Center), no standard Ribbon Menu widget (at least when it was first introduced, I'm not sure about the current status) so everyone reinvented it, e.g.

Then came Windows 8 and Windows 10, trying to converge PCs and phones. They screw up the UX.

This is so true... Windows 8/10 has a such mixed up UX that some system components are using the new 'metro' style while some others are old Win32 ones that don't support HiDPI... And, (while currently not true) Windows 10 had two settings app that worked differently for a few years. :-(

jazoom3• 7 years ago

Adding Flutter or any other UI library that draws everything from scratch is a bad idea.

Some would say re-writing the same app 5 times (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android) and maintaining 5 codebases is a bad idea.

pcr9103033• 7 years ago

Some would say re-writing the same app 5 times (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android) and maintaining 5 codebases is a bad idea.

Yeah, that's true. I'm looking forwards to React Native (AFAIK it uses the native JS engine + native toolkits) and libui.

I'm also hoping for declarative UI frameworks like SwiftUI so that the underlying framework/runtime can generate the appropriate UI for the exact target platform.

rvanmil• 7 years ago

It’s great that there are a lot of cross platform solutions today. On the other hand it’s also the reason why we put up with shit apps like Slack’s desktop and mobile clients. As a macOS and iOS user I’m sad because both platforms have a far superior native UI, but at the same time as a developer I’m glad I can quickly build things for multiple platforms because there is no way my customers would pay for separate native implementations.

pjmlp11• 7 years ago

Only when one doesn't use a solution like having the common logic in a portable language like C++, with bindings to native UI elements.

A solution used by plenty of commercial desktop software as we moved from Assembly as main application language for desktop apps during the 16 bit days.

Asooka• 7 years ago

There is always Qt and wxWidgets. Compared to e.g. electron for cross platform UI they are super tiny.

Cthulhu_• 7 years ago

IMO it really depends. There's a lot of big companies that have more than enough resources to be able to pay multiple dev teams to build and maintain apps across operating systems.

From a few years ago, Twitter and Facebook were famous examples. They pushed so hard to try and build their apps using web technology but kept running into performance issues (thanks to infinite scrolling). After spending fuck knows how much they finally admitted that maybe native components are better.

But this is Facebook, who have so much resources they can afford to build their own version of PHP three times over. I just don't understand why they put so much effort into trying to fit a square peg into a round hole instead of just going with native development.

But, I'm not an insider, I don't know the thought processes behind it. Long story short, IMO people overestimate how complex it is to build multiple native apps in parallel.

meerita2• 7 years ago

I assume you also do custom code for each platform inside Flutter as we do to respect iOS and Android guidelines. Some things are different and need separate code. This is a pain too. I had much better experience coding only for the platform than using Flutter.

namelosw• 7 years ago

draws everything from scratch is a bad idea. re-writing the same app 5 times (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android) and maintaining 5 codebases is a bad idea.

So probably React Native's approach (the approach itself, not React Native) is a really good idea, where you can:

1. Sharing code if you don't like re-writing n times. 2. Not sharing code if you want to have different native stuff for different platforms. 3. Mix 1 and 2 at any percentage as you wish. Typically reuse all the business logic, and separate view components.

dgellow4• 7 years ago

It depends what you mean by “re-writing the same app”. In general you can have the core features written in C++, thus available everywhere, then write a platform specific layer on top of this. That’s a quite common approach, and if done correctly (that’s not a trivial task though) allow you to target any platform without too much effort. But yes, you still have to maintain a bunch of stuff for each platform:

- implementation of the platform specific layer, supporting all the quirks of the target platform

- testing setup

- build system (some platforms have a lot of weird details to take in account)

The cost-benefit can be ok or terrible depending on the project. But for example for games, where you will draw your own UI anyway, that’s very common, and as far as I know that’s also what Microsoft is doing for their Office applications: common core in C++, then platform specific C#/Java/Objectice-C UIs.

turrini2• 7 years ago

Not true.

I'm working with C++/Qt/QML/Javascript. No need to maintain 5 codebases.

Just a single codebase compiles to at least 9 platforms: Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, *BSD, Raspberry, QNX and WebAssembly.

s_y_n_t_a_x3• 7 years ago

React Native. Handles everything in your list. Experimentally Linux (via Qt).

amw-zero5• 7 years ago

I do get that, but one is bad for developers and the other is bad for users. It’s up to you to decide which is more important for your project. Most projects I’ve worked on, the user experience was more important to the business, in which case native apps are better.

IshKebab4• 7 years ago

I think the popularity of Electron has shown that is actually isn't very important to users to use native controls.

Also on Desktop, macOS is the only one that even has a single official "native" toolkit.

aikinai• 7 years ago

Electron is popular with developers, not users.

obliviousonions• 7 years ago

UWP is actually pretty easy to use and looks great & native on Windows.

vijaybritto3• 7 years ago

The massive success of Electron apps shows that users don't really care about native controls. Even though electron is terrible in resource usage it enables unmatched development speed for teams. If libui or other libraries can give this experience then most teams won't hesitate using it!

MisterTea• 7 years ago

I liken Electron to McDonalds. Gets the job done in a pinch but is awful in every single way. (edit: spelling)

pjmlp11• 7 years ago

What success?

It helps when sometimes there isn't any options to start with.

I use Slack as job requirement, outside work I keep my PC Electron free.

Same applies to VSCode, only because of TypeScript and Rust, otherwise it wouldn't be on my computer.

chrismorgan• 7 years ago

Depends a little on what you mean by “native controls”. The web platform doesn’t provide all of the controls the underlying OS provides (e.g. a list view), but it does provide some of the most important and common ones. A text box, for example, has the native look-and-feel by default—and feel is the most important part of that, for things like caret behaviour, keyboard shortcuts and touch behaviour; and you can customise its look easily. It’s not the native implementation, but what the browser implements matches the native implementation.

rohan1024• 7 years ago

You yourself said

Stories like these are mostly only macOS; since Windows apps usually just re-invent all kinds of UI elements, while Linux's GUI toolkits are super-fragmented. (GTK vs Qt is one thing, and there are lots of other options!)

and on next line you say

Adding Flutter or any other UI library that draws everything from scratch is a bad idea.

The first thing you said is the reason why we need something like Flutter. There might be a standard way of doing things on Mac but on Windows and Linux there isn't. Flutter at least gives the hope that we will see consistent UIs across multiple platforms while maintaining same code base. That isn't bad thing.

jcelerier• 7 years ago

Flutter at least gives the hope that we will see consistent UIs across multiple platforms while maintaining same code base

well, no, it just adds another standard. QtQuick already allows the exact same thing that Flutter (one UI, shared across all platforms both in terms of code and looks). (QtWidgets instead is more geared towards applications that fit in the host platform's guidelines).

nnq6• 7 years ago

Coherent UI is a very important point to users

Nah, it ain't. At all! I used to believe it did. That's what we geeks think. And on mobile it doesn't matters for us either - keybings working consistently doesn't matter you're only using touch...

Same thing with React Native, everyone thought it's awesome because native UI controls. But users never care about that. For touch UIs it's more user friendly to have you app be friendly by being unique. The thing that "users prefer native" was just because users like fast and responsive UIs, if Flutter can provide fast and responsive UIs, nobody cares if it isn't native.

Even on desktop, the best UIs I've ever seen (take the new Blender's 2.8 widely appreciated UI) just use OpenGL and draw their own widgets.

People say they care about "coherence" or "consistency" when they are too clueless to figure out what's actually broken about their UIs, so they assume this is the issue. An awesome UX/I is one that would keep being awesome even if each and every button would have a different and inconsistent style, what matters is higher level. Let us stop bitching about things being incoherent or inconsistent when the actual issue is the lack of ability to figure out what is so wrong with a UI that it hinders users!

(Oh, and everyone will always want custom branding and styles, whether we like it or not... We need technology that can embrace uniqueness and incoherence and inconsistency and make it work properly and shippable in time!)

mstade• 7 years ago

Neither you nor the parent poster substantiate your assertions with sources, which made me curious of what research might have been done in this area. Some cursory searching lead me to this reasonably well sourced answer, which suggests the parent poster is right in this case: https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/39295

s_y_n_t_a_x3• 7 years ago

[citation needed]

All of my experience as a user and developer points me the other way, so I'll need some proof to be convinced.

saagarjha3• 7 years ago

People say they care about "coherence" or "consistency" when they are too clueless to figure out what's actually broken about their UIs, so they assume this is the issue.

I see developers push for non-native UI all the time because they think their users are too stupid to tell the difference. They're not.

amw-zero5• 7 years ago

I can’t agree with you. Inconsistent UI is not what users want at all. I hear them complain about it all the time.

nicoburns3• 7 years ago

I'm hoping a cross-platform UI takes over the world. Then it will be the "native" UI's that seem inconsistent.

vbsteven• 7 years ago

In a sense that already happened with the web stack. In tech like Electron developers write most of their app once and use a “shell” like Electron to interact with the host OS.

Unfortunately the web stack is very bloated with years of legacy and this requires these shell projects to embed a full browser engine making these apps bloated as well.

Flutter is an approach at making a new shell that provides rendering and host OS interaction without all the web bloat.

bernaferrari3• 7 years ago

Author here. Never expected it to reach here. 24k views and it's been ~14 hours since I wrote it. I agree with you. There is currently a competition between kotlin multiplatform and flutter, a shared backend vs a shared UI. Guess what, exactly what you said, it's a lot easier to share the backend than recreate the full UI like a game does. I'm not against flutter, but it feels too immature for now and the pains really show up. Apple showed up their new UI toolkit for developers, which does animations in the best way possible, Flutter team reaction was "you can make a library to improve it if you want" and "we should improve our docs" but no one will recognize there are issues in the framework that could be improved.

sebe• 7 years ago

BMW seems happy with flutter and are opensourcing some of their flutter libs.

Quote from CTO Connected Company at BMW

“By combining Dart and Flutter we have the first true cross-platform mobile toolkit; we feel it is a game changer to ensure feature parity for digital touchpoints and IoT. By moving forward with world class tooling, automation and modern functional programming patterns we can improve feature cycle time, security, and cost of delivery of features for the business.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80pRyn7fZRk&feature=youtu.be...

dgellow4• 7 years ago

Coherent UI is a very important point to users IMO. Users can assume that some special feature from App X will also work on App Y.

If you’re talking about macOS, then I agree with you, that’s something I cared about when I was using Apple’s OS. Recently I moved to Windows for my personal machine, on this system you really don’t have coherence between applications, even between things developed by the same company or for applications tightly coupled with the OS! It’s just a big mess where each interface has its own set of rules incompatible with others. I would understand if people more familiar with Windows don’t care at all about the overall coherence given how random things seems to be.

stelonix• 7 years ago

I agree with this 90%, but I'm not sure about the state of GUI apps after Windows 7. Up to Win7 though, most applications simply used native controls, sometimes wrapped by WPF or WFC.

I used to write for WINAPI/GDI and I used to loathe it; I mostly disliked the way messages were handled by default: huge switch statements. After switching to Linux and checking out the many "toolkits" I find myself craving for some GDI-esque toolkit. GDI was bad, outdated when I started writing it (circa 2009) but things "just worked", looks were consistent and controls would do the same across applications. The GNU/Linux counterpart is a mess: drag & drop sometimes works across toolkits, sometimes it does not; some toolkits are unwillingly to standarize with each other; the looks are all different, the functionalities too. Need an IME? Well here's one for KDE and another one for GTK. And if you use a different toolkit, chances are there's no IME for you. Right clicking on text-boxes and getting the same default options is great, so is being able to extend the same text-boxes systemwide. This is simple on Windows, but GNU/Linux requires one implementation per widget type per toolkit. It's all fragmented and no one cares. I miss GDI, I crave for a simple standard X11-wide widget system. Users do care about widgets working the same on different applications and they don't care about which toolkit is being used, specially non-tech savvy people. I believe those issues are more linked to the meme of "year of the desktop Linux" never arriving than anything else, really: UX should be consistent.

Well now I'll end my rant.

buckminster• 7 years ago

Minor nit: GDI was the graphics API. The user interface came from USER.

mamcx• 7 years ago

We really should be trying to use the native GUI toolkit

Yes.

The problem with that is that it requiere experience * each toolkit and that is pain-full for many.

This cause a FORCED split (when multi-platform):

- You want easy to use and fast iteration. You NOT use native UI. Reach for mediocre options

- You want the BEST of the BEST of the BEST. You pick native UI. However sometimes that toolkit is nuts (Windows API, Android, Linux. Ok like all of them?) Or if lucky you know the other alternative (Windows -> Delphi, Android -> Kotlin, Linux -> ????)

----

This is not a fair fight. UI is too hard everywhere. C++ toolkits are nuts.

And it not need to be this way.

I think today we already have a good idea in how truly a good toolkit must be done: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/9bapwt/thoughts_on_wh...

- A lot can be actually cross-platform: Layouts, Units, colors, fonts calculation...

- Widget definition with a DSL (like SwiftUI) This allow:

- Real-time drawing of widgets AND easy drag-drop UI creation like Delphi or HyperCard (this is where HTML beat almost everything)

The above are candidates for cross-ui then you need:

- Rendered by each toolkit. With native controls

- Some way to communicate the backend to this front-end

I think this is alike a game engine:

1- You define the UI:

    <Window title="hello"><UIButton if="iOS"> <Button if="the others">

2- You have a driver that launch the UI:

    UI derived from BaseUI..

    //customize it for my project or create a new platform

    UI.register(UIButton...
    UI.register(UIWindow for "Window"
    //Attach listeners..
    UI.listen(...)
    //Run the UI
    UI.run(the UI directory)

When using a "no namespaced" control like "Button" it work like Flutter: The engine chose whatever it want. When use a specific control "UIButton" it trust the launcher to handle it. Or fallback if to the generic.

---

To be clear:

This is almost the same as usual. Except it work like a interpreted language: It have a monolithic core but is possible to code a specific version per platform (if desired). The critical component is the ability to register to the engine (very easily!) new widgets, listeners, behaviors. etc.

russellbeattie• 7 years ago

Add to this Accessibility: Standard widgets normally have accessibility features built in, working well and tested to make sure apps work correctly with various assistive technologies like screen readers, zooming, key controls, etc.

dep_b• 7 years ago

I liked the way the UI was built in Flutter and of course Dart > vanilla JS. But with SwiftUI and Jet Pack around the corner there's a bit less appeal, especially since Kotlin & Swift > Dart and a lot of UX niceties come for free in iOS, like rotation / resizing or hiding the keyboard while scrolling.

IshKebab4• 7 years ago

So mostly this is just complaining about bugs. Does he think that native Android doesn't have bugs? One could easily write the same article for any UI framework.

Also it seems like he is complaining that the Flutter team actually uses a public bug tracker. Does he really prefer Android's bug tracker? The place where bug reports go to die. A year or so ago they gave up on it and basically closed every bug as obsolete.

lovelearning• 7 years ago

I have a couple of android app PoCs in mind but didn't want to go down the Android SDK way which IMO is becoming more and more complicated and verbose with every release.

Just tried Flutter and React-Native yesterday for the first time, and I'm sorry to say both were sorely disappointing.

Flutter was easier to install and get working, but Dart seems to be as verbose as Java with some JavaScript style syntax mixed in. The main dart file was as verbose as a boilerplate native SDK Activity.

RN was worse, though I expected it to be simpler. Something called metro server nearly froze the entire machine on every attempt. Had to power off and restart about 5 times. Then, based on GitHub discussions, built something else called watchman from sources. The official docs don't mention that watchman is critical. That improved it for a while but then the system wide near-freeze came back again. I wasn't even able to display a simple hello world app because of installation and deployment problems.

So far, Kivy seems to be the only alternative that is both simple to code and to deploy. Its file sizes are massive, but given that I already find Android SDK so frustrating to design and implement quickly, I don't want alternatives that are equally frustrating.

javajosh• 7 years ago

While it's good feedback to the respective project owners to make onboarding easier, it is a mistake to judge tools based on < 1 day of usage (which is almost entirely onboarding angst). You are only experiencing one, relatively infrequent transient story, not the steady-state one.

In the beginning of a devs experience framework code appears to eclipse app code in size and complexity, but over time the app will tend to grow to overwhelm the framework.

nnq6• 7 years ago

Yep, React Native has horrible dev experience... this is what drove me to Flutter. Dart may be ugly but after you get used to it it's mostly "Typescript done right" imo ;)

thiht2• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure Typescript is already "Typescript done right"

d0100• 7 years ago

Does it? Expo simplifies 90% of dev work, and you only need to eject in very rare occasions.

hardwaresofton5• 7 years ago

For those who are looking for an alternative to Flutter/React Native, please check out Nativescript @ https://docs.nativescript.org!

It's different in a few key ways:

- Draws native components (Flutter draws every pixel)

- Pure JS native (i.e. JNI powered) shim layer (you can write stuff like `const intent = new Intent()`)

- Typescript as first-class (not quite so with React Native, and IMO Typescript > Dart as far as type systems and ergonomics are concerned)

- Ability to use both Angular and Vue to structure your app (there's also projects out there like Svelte-Native, which is extremely promising from the performance perspective)

- More community driven project (with Progress standing behind, following the open-source & extra features business model)

deanclatworthy• 7 years ago

Looks interesting, but from the homepage I had absolutely no idea this had anything to do with apps. What would be a good place to start?

hardwaresofton5• 7 years ago

Sorry maybe the homepage is better to start on (I linked to the docs page):

https://www.nativescript.org/

Here's a talk from 2 years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELemwZXJZVg

I personally prefer Nativescript-Vue and I find their docs to be very good:

https://nativescript-vue.org/en/docs/introduction

Some more video resources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcCSq2Y9bow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR1ESQTALI0

I personally think the best way to learn it is to get your hands dirty and use it to build something, so I'd recommend that, but there are certainly resources out there as well.

rishav_sharan• 7 years ago

Pity. It seems to be mobile only.

ex3ndr2• 7 years ago

They are running JS code on Main thread. Thank's but no.

iainmerrick4• 7 years ago

I wouldn’t necessarily write this off. Doing UI-related work directly in the main thread has a lot of benefits -- your click listeners can take effect immediately and make all the necessary UI updates before the next event is processed. With event handling in a separate thread, it can be harder to make things robust (filtering out double taps, preventing flashes of unfinished/unstyled content, etc).

Of course you do need to make sure that everything that could be even slightly expensive is shipped out to a background thread. JS is weak in that respect.

Moving everything to a background thread does fix that problem, but I think it’s overkill. A lot of mobile apps would be faster and more responsive if they used the main thread more. You just have to use it right.

hardwaresofton5• 7 years ago

Nativescript has supported the web worker paradigm for multi-threading for a while now[0]. Also, I'd like to point that for a lot of applications (especially the ones that are basically informational without much interaction or client-side work, this actually isn't an issue early in the development process.

I've used Nativescript on client projects, and it is fantastic for prototyping, with well demarcated paths to performance optimization. Since you can easily use native screens/controllers/etc with it, at the very least you can use it for fast prototyping then drop all your custom code in.

Do you know of any hybrid frameworks that are not running JS code on the main thread by default? And by JS code I assume you mean display-related code, because Flutter suffers from this same issue, do too much hard work on the main thread and it stalls (as anything would). Even on android itself[1] you need to do some extra work to make sure your UI-related heavy lifting happens off the main thread:

However, when the main thread’s messaging queue contains tasks that are either too numerous or too long for the main thread to complete the update fast enough, the app should move this work to a worker thread

[0] https://docs.nativescript.org/core-concepts/multithreading-m...

[1] https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/threads

gitgud2• 7 years ago

This seems like a fairly biased post (as he admits himself). Flutter has a lot of problems, but if you've used any other cross-platform system, you know it's a hard problem to solve.

A friend described it to me as "Unity for apps", which I think is pretty positive and accurate.

bernaferrari3• 7 years ago

Author here. Yeah, it was supposed to be "here are my frustrations", not like "Flutter is bad, let's burn it".. but of course, the thing grew up beyond control. 38k view so far.

winter_blue• 7 years ago

A solid alternative is Intel's Multi-OS Engine: https://multi-os-engine.org/

All it does is let you write iOS UI code in Java or Kotlin, and target both iOS and Android from a single project.

It uses the actual underlying iOS API, and simply provides Java wrappers for them, that map one-to-one.

I keep wondering, and don't know why it hasn't gained much traction. It is so much better than Flutter, is obviously reliable since it's a simple 1-1 mapping/translation layer. (There is more work involved with it, as you have to write the UI lawyer twice, but that's about it.)

wastedhours2• 7 years ago

I tried Flutter a few times to have a play - really like it. Obviously a lot of the packages available hook you into the Google ecosystem (Firebase is ridiculously easy to get working).

There are quite a few things missing, and I personally found it quite hard to get going (but that might just be a general lack of skill at getting tooling set up), but there's an awful lot to like if you want to dive into getting something set up on-device quickly.

pjmlp11• 7 years ago

I still don't see any big advantages over Xamarin Native, Qt or plain C++ with native views, when going through this route.

All of the with the bonus that C#, JavaScript and C++ actually have lots of market demand, Dart remains a possible CoffeScript.

IshKebab4• 7 years ago

The biggest advantage is easy GUI creation, especially with animations and custom styling. Stuff that you can do with Flutter is basically impossible with native Android. You also don't have to deal with the insanity of Activities and Fragments.

Qt is pretty good, and QML has decent animation support but I think their mobile implementation is still very alpha, and since being acquired (again) they've kind of refocused on embedded devices like cars where they actually make money. Also it's not free. And QML is a bit less elegant than Flutter. It practically forces you to write spaghetti code.

I don't know how you'd use "C++ with native views" on Android, and I've only heard bad things about Xamarin Native.

pjmlp11• 7 years ago

The same way that Dropbox, Microsoft and plenty of other companies do.

You use a JNI generator and follow the so called hamburger architecture.

Microsoft and Dropbox have several sessions done at CppCon.

rileyteige• 7 years ago

Speaking strictly to the Xamarin here... as someone who has worked professionally w/ Xamarin, Xamarin.Forms, and Flutter: Flutter knocks it out of the park. My experience with Xamarin was so buggy as to be nearly unusable (on Stable no less!). The documentation, _especially in Xamarin.Forms_, was sooo lacking! I wanted so hard for it to be "the next great thing", but there were just too many gotchas and pain points. In contrast, Flutter "just works", has great documentation, great community, great tooling. My development in Flutter, especially with the hot reload they support, has sped up immensely. I can pause the debugger, change code on the fly, continue the debugger, no hiccups. It has been nothing short of wonderful. My anecdotal two cents.

pjmlp11• 7 years ago

Hence why explicitly left Forms out.

For me having to deal with Dart, a programming language without any other purpose than Flutter, it rules out any advantage over Xamarin.

With Xamarin I have C# and the whole .NET ecosystem available.

meerita2• 7 years ago

My experience working with Flutter:

- Overclomplicated syntax. - Material Design doesn't look as good as the native. Feels like imitation in many cases. - no vector drawable, PDF or Lottie support - I had to create special code for iOS to match certain patterns and components. - Typopraphy done wrong.

Flutter maybe something good to start with, but once you want to reach good app design/code maintain that would be painfull and you will feel faster and more organized if you do things in their native realms.

verttii3• 7 years ago

Are you a native iOS dev? I feel Flutter is a major upgrade over React Native, but perhaps native devs just feel it still falls short on a lot of accounts.

tobiaswk2• 7 years ago

I simply love Flutter for Android and iOS development and have been using it since alpha. I haven't tried the web application part; I'm pretty sure I never will. Here's my opinion. I've created several apps with Flutter and every time I enjoy it. The UI is easy to make beautiful and the resulting code easy to read. It feels like all what the current Android SDK is missing. The current Android SDK is old and quite frankly painfull to work with. You just can't create beautiful apps with ease; it's always a hassle. It's also messy and not easy to read the resulting code. The way the whole way the framework is structured entails ugly code in my opinion. This all becomes evident when you use different apps on Google Play. You get the sense that every app reinvented their UI; there is no real UI continuity. Google became a freeloader after JetBrains created Kotlin and marketed it will. The thing is Kotlin made just a little better; in terms of boilerplate stuff; the framework I still hate compared to Flutter. What I really like about flutter is the framework and “it’s all a widget” idea. You can basically do crazy things in UI with ease and on the other hand just use the standard UI components with a great result.

As an example I've created an alternative to Nissan's Connect EV app. It's basically a way to control and monitor your electric vehicle from Nissan. The official app is I’m very disappointed by; it’s slow and full of wrong decisions.

My alternative is called "My Leaf" and its available on Google Play and the App Store; https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.kjeldsen.ca... https://apps.apple.com/us/app/my-leaf-for-nissan-ev/id143670... It's completely open source.

555513• 7 years ago

Those 1-star reviews on the Play Store are infuriating !

tobiaswk2• 7 years ago

I agree. It tears on the developer for sure.

dkobia• 7 years ago

@tobiaswk - good job with your apps! I completely agree with Android and UI design which is painful. Flutter is far from perfect but a non designer can create something pretty decent. Users appreciate the experience.

karma_fountain2• 7 years ago

I've written one app in flutter and the experience was good. It was very easy to get started, and the dev experience was on par with web development with very fast hot reload.

However I would say where it excels at is in creating a fully custom-branded experience rather than sticking to the native elements. I reckon https://reflectly.app/ is the poster child for this.

royal_ts• 7 years ago

I don't get the part about Scrolling. It doesn't feel not native it feels incredible fluid, smooth as butter.

codedokode• 7 years ago

I am not sure if users care about controls being "native". Examples from desktop: Photoshop used non-native controls, and nobody cared. MS Office always had non-native looking menus. DAW (digital audio workstation) apps all look non-native.

saagarjha3• 7 years ago

Photoshop used non-native controls, and nobody cared.

There's a number of Photoshop alternatives that use native controls that are reasonably popular (they're also generally cheaper, too).

bfrog• 7 years ago

This just reminded me of how horrible doing things with react native was. A reminder I didn't really need.

mekkkkkk• 7 years ago

Tip: For anyone trying out Flutter, please remember to evaluate it based on release builds of your app. Scrolling and animations can feel a bit "off" when running the default debug builds. The 60 FPS butter is only really applied when that `--release` flag gets tacked on.

Not using Android Studio, so not sure how easy it is to miss the massive performance difference of optimized vs. debug builds in that workflow.

jinglebells2• 7 years ago

If running in Debug mode means it's running < 60fps I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. Native stuff doesn't do that and React Native/Nativescript don't do that either!

johnday• 7 years ago

The debug mode induces a seriously huge overhead. In return you get stateful hot reloading and high quality error management and tracing, both of which are incredibly valuable while developing.

navd• 7 years ago

Flutter is not that bad. It is a step in the right direction but there are some paradigms that makes simple things hard. Animations are harder than necessary and building non default layouts requires a bit of thinking to get right.

My biggest issue is that there is still this "uncanny valley" feeling when using a flutter app. It feels much better than a react native or Cordova app, but something still feels off.

Right now it seems great for prototyping. For iOS however, I've been playing around a bit with SwiftUI which currently (even in its beta state) provides an astronomically better dev experience and user experience.

gamma3• 7 years ago

Why should someone ever need to offer a bug-fix bounty!?

Author expects bugs in open source projects to get fixed for free, by someone else.

We need to support open source maintainers instead of shaming them. I'm excited about Open Collective and made a monthly donation to a project I use.

piokoch• 7 years ago

The question is: if Flutter will not get traction that Google expects, what will happen with the project?

The space of multi-platform mobile apps toolkit is already occupied by several well established players (React Native, Qt, Xamarin and a dozen of other more or less popular tools, sometimes well entrenched in their niches, like Unity for games).

Flutter comes with rather obscure language and is late in the game, so it will have to provide something truly game-changing to succeed and I am not sure if that what it offers now is sufficiently appealing.

verttii3• 7 years ago

While it may not appeal to native devs I've found Flutter a lot more appealing compared to React Native.

React Native just keeps breaking things, like for example at something like 0.56 the textinput just broke on Android beyond usable and was stuck at that for like half a year.

I don't particularly like Dart as a language but as an SDK Flutter just feels a lot more solid than RN.

Bootwizard• 7 years ago

It will get cancelled just like every other Google project that's not the best in its field. Google can't seem to handle being second best in any project they start, so they use cancelling projects as a way to hide the evidence of their failures.

krzat5• 7 years ago

The strength of Flutter is it's architecture. Nothing comes close. Web is too slow. Xamarin/React Native is too restricted by native layer. Qt is C++.

Popularity of Flutter increases steadily: https://trends.google.pl/trends/explore?cat=31&date=today%20...

seeekr2• 7 years ago

Does someone know what the state of the RN rearchitecture effort is? And is there likely going to be a smooth upgrade path forward without much breakage across the ecosystem?

jinglebells2• 7 years ago

Nativescript is more powerful than React Native because it gives you direct access to the JAVA/Objective C libraries if you need it.

I reviewed Flutter but got put off by the levels of abstraction.

pjmlp11• 7 years ago

Yeah right, as if Common Lisp and Smalltalk, or the myriad of 90's 4GLs never happened.

Popularity does not translate in money nor projects, specially with a niche language designed for doing UIs only, lacking libraries left and right.

jillesvangurp• 7 years ago

IMHO the architecture is actually it's weakness. I know a lot of Android developers who don't want to go near it because they have to give up a lot (language, nice frameworks, etc.). Marying Flutter to Dart in an age where everything has been trending towards LLVM based compiler tool chains on native for well over a decade seems misguided.

Yet Flutter fills an important gap in the market: pure native experiences are slowly dying because native look and feel is increasingly meaningless now that so many apps use non native UI kits. Also, supporting multiple UI teams developing for different platforms is a huge risk for small companies and a lot of hassle even for those teams that can afford it. We need more cross platform stuff but I don't believe Flutter is the solution here because of its architecture, which is a combination of "our way or the highway" and vendor lock in. I'd say there is a big risk of Apple doing something smart with Swift on Android and web. I actually know of a few Android developers using Swift on Android already. This is becoming a thing. Like Kotlin, Swift is perfectly positioned to start targeting cross platform via LLVM. Also WASM is becoming a thing. IMHO, Google needs to make U turn here and rip out whatever it is that prevents Flutter from being driven from Kotlin (jvm and native) and other llvm languages.

All that's missing is a proper cross platform UI toolkit that actually works properly in that ecosystem. Things like QT and GTK are obviously usable in that space but a bit clunky/ugly on mobile.

marktechson• 7 years ago

As a flutter user, I think the answer to what is "game-changing" is the flexibility it provides for making custom UI screens that would be really challenging in other frameworks. Also, there's the top notch animation support. When combined with tools like Flare, things are much more straight forward to create and they are cross-platform to boot.

dejaime• 7 years ago

Even though my experience is basically the same as the author's (8y using java/kotlin toolchain), the article still seems to be written by someone with a hammer frustrated with screws for not working properly. His points can be summed up as "Flutter isn't as stable as the java toolchain that has existed for over a decade" and "I want Flutter to work the way I am used to work".

Flutter looks good, but is painful

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