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Comment by yawn | Hacker News Reader

> 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 native changes and bug fixes, it can prevent you from using time-saving tooling for the native environment, etc.

What happens when the native controls change? What do I see when I'm running an older native version?

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Another issue is when your customer (or boss) ask you for this very simple feature that's found everywhere ( because it's a native sdk feature) and you suddenly realize you'll have the spend days if not weeks implementing it. I wouldn't be surprised if maps weren't as powerful in flutter as in native android or ios sdk for a long time.

Still, i think the "low level / pixel level" approach that flutter took is the only one that makes sense. You can't abstract away GUI layers like the android one or the iOS one. it's just way too big, and they are themselves trying to abstract away discrepancies between OS versions. I don't understand how could anyone expect to get something of professional quality with a layer on top, knowing how hard it is to get it right even with the default tools.

They are taking on a gargantuan task though..

I’ve been writing a new project in Flutter and so far it’s been dramatically faster than writing an app with either of the native SDKs. The issue you mention here is the key downside though. For example, as far as I know there is no map component or video player. I don’t happen to need those, but if you did it’d be a deal breaker probably.

(disclaimer: I work on Flutter)

Thanks for the feedback. We're currently exploring how to do inline video, which we think will teach us about techniques for inline maps. These are very top requested features. Stay tuned! :)

(disclaimer: I work on the Flutter team)

> What do I see when I'm running an older native version?

You will see exactly the pixels that your designer intended and your developer coded. :) Apps built with Flutter ship the renderer and framework inside the app, which helps ensure consistency and fidelity across devices, OEMs, OS, and platform. This is particularly important for brands that want a brand-first design delivered consistently to all their users. Hope that helps!

Not to diminish your amazing work. I'm not sure brand-first is user-first. Its most user-friendly to use the standard phone OS controls that they are already familiar with.

Thank you for replying in this thread.

Another question. Why is there no desktop support?

I'm not on their team but the answer is rather self-evident.

There are 100x mobile developers than desktop developers which is why there's so much more investment in mobile tools than desktop tools.

Also, this is Google-led project and Google doesn't write desktop apps (modulo few exceptions like Chrome). As every team, they have more work than they can manage, so they have to prioritize things that are important to them.

Yeah, been there, done that.

The problem with building your own UI toolkit is that you can never make it feel native. You can get 90% there, but it always feels a bit off to the user. The more you make things look like native controls, the more users expect them to act like native controls and tiny differences get amplified.

I'm not sure 100% fidelity to native look and feel is so important to users, as long as the UI is fast, responsive and looks good. Spotify doesn't seem to have a problem with users despite its garish black and green appearance.

You're also only going to get any of the perceived benefits of the choice to build a custom UI kit if you're only solving the same problems that the framework authors were solving.

If you suddenly need, as an example that I've come across, a list of stats to update with a high tick rate which is unusual in an app so no one optimises for it you'll likely find you're no longer anywhere near a native experience.

I know that's not a unique problem with opinionated frameworks, but it's usually a programming issue to solve in the background, not a deal-breaker due to how every customer suffers.

Fair points. It's worth stating though that this only matters if you have a requirement to look 100% native. Many apps don't have this requirement whether mobile or desktop and so they may use a web ui. In our case we didn't have the 100% native requirement and used Qt. We still had a really slick user interface, it just wasn't native.

Note that our customers are primarily concerned about the functionality of the app: They are not drive by consumers, they come to the application because of it's functionality. I understand that not everyone has this kind of customer.

It's not just about the look, it's about the feel.

From looking at the "gallery app" on android:

Flutter's input-text has their own custom mark text handler - no double tap, long press opens a custom menu that is missing native options (Such as translate text).

Changing the font size in the OS does nothing in the app.

Clicking on buttons doesn't make a tap sound if the "sound on tap" option is set.

I'm guessing no accessibility support - or very poor one.

There's probably many more tiny issues that customer's will complain about when you a product is shipped to production that will make it clear that this isn't a native app.

A lot of those are things we've fixed since we published that app. We're just not very good about publishing updates to the play store. I'll see if we can get an update out soon.

(disclaimer: I work on Flutter)

Thanks for your feedback! I opened https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/12438 to track the "not playing a sound when tapped". We're currently working on improving our accessibility support.

> 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.

Indeed it is the much harder road to travel. It all depends on who is developing the platform however. Google can pull it off, which is why Flutter is worth considering.

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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